Booting From Mirrored Drive 1

[cvanderjagt]

My server is now mirrored (raid1) over 2 scsi drives. This server has no floppy or cdrom so I am currently unable to create a rescue boot disk. If my first scsi drive fails will the system be able to boot from the mirror?

Here is the boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows Server 2003, Standard" /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINNT="Boot Mirror C: - secondary plex"

It looks to me like this is telling the server on boot to use the primary partition to boot first and the mirror if that is unavailable. Is this correct?

Thanks!

 

[longlivegoku]

If I am correct the "system", meaning Windows, only sees it as one hard drive. It doesn't know it's a mirror. Your RAID controller is in charge of that. So to answer your question, Windows will have no idea if a drive fails in the RAID 1.

 

[cvanderjagt]

in this case there is no raid controller. there are 2 scsi drives, windows handles the raid 1 config when the mirror is created.

 

[Robroy2003]

If they are just Scsi cards and the raid is done in windows it will give you a boot screen to choose the second drive.

Mark Spencer

 

[cvanderjagt]

thanks just wanted to be sure.