alright folks,
i'm a bit stumped on this one and could use some serious help!
the issue:
we have a windows server 2003 standard setup on a Dell Optiplex PC (dont ask!), which has 2 x IDE 80gb hard drives installed in it. windows was used to convert both disks to dynamic and then a mirror was setup. 1 of the hard drives has crashed and will not even spin up anymore - when we apply power to it via an external hd enclosure, the circuit board on the underside of the drive gets so hot that you can't touch it. i now see where the crash came from ;) however, we have the mirrored hard drive (drive #2) that we should be able to boot off of. this hard drive contains data worth a very very large amount and my customer is freaking out.
what i've done/found so far:
At first I thought that I needed to edit the boot.ini file on drive #2, so i went ahead and hooked the drive up to my external hd enclosure and first attempted to read the drive on a xp pro box, which would not recognize the drive. I then tried plugging the drive into a server 2003 enterprise box, which recognized the drive and appeared to be istalled correctly in device manager, however in Disk Management i noticed that the drive was labeled "Dynamic. Offline." I tried to right click on the drive and "reactivate" it, which did not work. I noticed there was an option there to "remove mirror", but I didnt select this as this is the only copy of data that I have....which is rather important to retrieve.
My next step was just to plug the drive back into the server, set the jumpers to CS and boot the server. The post screen came up and then the windows server 2003 splash screen (i was jumping for joy) then it just restarted after a few sec's of being on the splash screen. now it just stays in a perpetual reboot. i'm figuring this is good news, as the machine see's a valid windows installation and i'm also assuming the mirror was intact and the data i'm looking for is also on there.
I've also tried booting off of a windows server 2003 enterprise disc, just to get into the recovery console which I can boot into just fine. However it does not recognize the C: as having any data on it whatsoever. no luck there :(
I attempted to use a copy of Acronis Disk Director that i downloaded, however this software package does not support mirrors created in windows. no luck there. :(
I then downloaded a copy of Ultimate Boot CD (v ) from download.com and went ahead and created a boot disk, using the files from the server 2003 enterprise disk. considering the install i'm trying to get working is a server 2003 standard install, will there be a problem with using an enterpise disk for this? i'm not too sure. When I boot the server off of the Ultimate Boot CD, the program itself wouldnt run as it stated that my NTLDR file was corrupt. Now does this mean that the NTLDR file on the boot disk is corrupt, as it's attempting to boot into it's own environment, or does this mean that the NTLDR file on my hard drive is corrupt?
Either way I look at it, I can't seem to access this dynamic disk or get it to boot. any help would be much appreciated!!
giving our 300 points for this one, A+ and all the multipliers to come!
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