HELP in RAID ONE Setup on Win 2000 Server

[nycomputergeek]

I have three hard drives. All three drives are dynamic. One is the C drive (obviously). I followed the instrcutions in the Windows 2000 server help files in order to set up the other two drives for RAID one mirroring. My problem lies in the fact that after the two drives were formatted for mirroring, I was under the impression that the Windows 2000 server operating system, along with the boot sector, had been copied over to the mirrored drives. So, I wanted to test this to make sure that the mirrored drives would boot up the system. I shut down the file server, unplugged the C drive and then booted up again, but the mirrored drives did not kick in. Instead, I received the standard error message: BOOT DISK FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. Obviously, I must be missing a step (or three) that the Windows 2000 server help files aren't telling me. Can anyone help me out so I can finish this off. This is my first file server I'm building, as I have dealt mostly with IBM AS/400s and stand alone PCs for the last 15 yrs. I have to make the transition sometime because unfortunately, the AS/400 is dieing out and rather quickly too! SOMEBODY HELP! LOL

 

[jthiessen]

Are you using a SCSI adapter? If so, rejumper the drives to the priority SCSI ID. If you are using IDE drives, jumper one to master.

 

[nycomputergeek]

I am using IDE drives. If you are talking about the jumpers on the mirrored hard drives, I had The two drives set appropriately, as master and slave when I did the test.

 

[jthiessen]

edit your boot.ini to read from the other physical drive

 

[nycomputergeek]

How? I never did THAT before. Essentially, i need this to kick in - in the event the C drive ever crashes. How would I tell the boot.ini to take care of this? (Thanks for all your help).

 

[jthiessen]

if the mirrored system/boot partition fails, the system won't boot, since the necessary boot files will reside on the failed mirror disk. To remedy this, you need to have a fault tolerant boot disk available. To create a fault tolerant boot disk, you must perform the following steps:


Format a floppy disk under Windows NT.
Copy the appropriate boot files to the floppy disk.
Modify the ARC path in the boot.ini file to point to the other member of the mirror set.
Test the disk. Don't wait to give it a trial by fire.
The following files are needed for the floppy disk:


ntldr--The NT boot loader
ntdetect.com--The hardware detection program
boot.ini--The menu of operating system choices to boot to
ntbootdd.sys--A driver used to boot SCSI controllers without the on board BIOS (this file is used primarily when you have more than one SCSI controller in a machine, and their BIOS conflict)

With disk mirroring, there is no automatic boot. Go here for more details on recovery and editing your ARC paths in boot.ini.

Good Luck =)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnntpro00/html/RAID.asp

 

[nycomputergeek]

I found the ntldr and ntdetect files (I pulled them off of the windows 2000 server CD). But I cannot seem to find the boot.ini file nor can I find the ntbootdd.sys file. Doing a full search, they are not coming up on my C drive, nor are they on my windows 2000 server CD.

 

[jthiessen]

hmm, no boot.ini is strange, but you can always create one. The linked document will show you how. If you are using IDE drives don't worry about the ntbootdd.sys file.