booting from mirrored drive

[Estelle]

I'm playing around with mirrored setups on Windows 2k servers at the moment for documenting DR and i've come across a bit of a weirdo which i wondered if anyone else has seen (and hopefully found a resolution for!)

Server set up is a HP E800 running Windows 2k server, no raid card, just 2 identical software mirrored drives on the onboard scsi. There is no system partition installed on either drive, although the server was installed using NetNavigator CDROM and both drives contain the mirror of both partitions.
I want to test booting from the second mirror simulating failed first drive - have disconnected the first drive. The first partition is set to active. The boot.ini on the floppy disk is correct and boots to the OSloader screen, then comes up with a screen asking which hardware profile you would like to run from, the choice being Profile1 or new hardware profile. It doesn't matter which you select, dots fly about three quarters of the way across a black screen and then the server reboots itself. You find yourself stuck in this circle. I can get into the recovery console but it comes up with 'the path or file specified is not valid' and nothing can be done, but if i run the windows 2000 server cd as if i was about to load the operating system, it gets to the partition table and lists bot partitions as 'unknown or damaged format'! (On the original disk, i can get into the recovery console fine, but i still get the same on the partition table if i run the install up.)
I've got a feeling that what happens is that HP Net Nav installs something onto the partition that means that you cannot recover from a software mirror if you use the Net nav CD at all. I know HP state that they don't support software mirroring and Microsoft state that they don't support manufacturer system tools being used to install. Anyone got any thoughts on this?? Is there a workaround or way i can recover this second mirror?

 

[glynnj]

I have had similiar experiences with mirrors and recovery.

Check if there is a hidden partition - sometimes created if you use the HP(in our case Dell) server utilities. This partition usually cannot be mirrored in Win2K. (We ended up rebuilding all our servers to remove this partition to support mirroring without the vendor utils.)

Are you breaking the mirrors? If you "break" the mirror in Computer management and then try to boot from the secondary drive it won't work because your drive letters will not match the boot disk. Instead similate a real failure by just removing the primary and booting from the secondary drive.

Make sure the drive are identical - Model, size etc.

You shouldn't need the boot.ini on your floppy for this exercise because it will be on the mirrored drive. Do not make any changes to the boot.ini file.

You also shouldn't need to access the recovery console because the secondary disk is identical to the primary and should boot as normal.

I had the same problems trying to find support from Microsoft re mirroring disks.

Hope this helps

Joe

 

[Estelle]

There is definitely no hidden partition, i went into fdisk from dos boot disk to check that the drive was set to first partition as active, which it was and there are definitely 2 non dos partitions of 4GB each, which was exactly as i partitioned it.
The two drives are identical 9GB HP drives.
I'm not breaking the mirror, i'm disconnecting the first drive to simulate failure. I change the jumper for the scsi so the second drive is set to 0 same as first and then boot using a NTboot disk as per the MS technet articles describe.
It wasn't the need for the recovery console, but just the fact that i couldn't get to it properly, so was listing everything i could think of here that might get suggested to try to give the answers up front!! Same with running install to the partition table section to see what that said.