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Booting files

We are currently running Windows NT 4 SP5 on a Compaq Proliant 3000 with mirrored 4gb drives. Using NT to mirror the drives, we were going to test pulling the primary out and boot from the second. To our surprise, the machine would not boot. We tried switching the boot files (boot.ini) to reflect the change but no luck. Has anyone accomplished this and can you please tell me what I am doing wrong? I know it cannot be that hard.

Thanks in advance.


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You cannot boot from the mirrored drive, you must create a boot floppy with NTLDR; NTDETECT.COM; NTBOOTDD.SYS and BOOT.INI. You need to modify the BOOT.INI to point to the partition number of the other mirrored volume:

For Example:

change:
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINNT

to:
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)WINNT

Once you have restarted NT, you must use Fault Tolerance>Break Mirror. You then need to reestablish the mirror with another free partition.

I hope this helps,

Steven
WQuinn
http://www.wquinn.com/


This was first published in July 2001

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