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I rebooted my server and it did not want to boot , it stayed at the blinking cursor.

I was tryin to do a restore on Veritas, but since I got the wrong tape and I could not abort the restore session I went ahead and try to reboot the server, I did get a window message about a disk orphaning, when I turned on the monitor but I did not think much of it. Anyway when I rebooted it goes through the hardware list and then it goes to the blinking cursor and it stayed there, anyeay I rebooted from a floppy and try to see what is going on,Iwent into Event viewer and I had a ftdisk error, I think it was event id 12, and then I remember the window message when I first logged in to the server so I went into Disk Administrator and it gave me an error message about one of my disk had changed and was not longer present then I looked at my disks and I had only one, I had mirrored drives with 4 partitions, now I only see one, did one of my hard drives failed, which one was it the mirror drive I would think so since I can reboot even if it is from the floppy, right? Anyway my question is how can I find out and if one of my hard drives failed how do I go about when I get anotherhard drive, to copy everything from the other one, what's the best way to do this, I need your suggestions, in the meantime I can not reboot my server right, and if I do I can only do it from the floppy, does this damage anything within the system, I know I still need to find the files I was trying to restore when all this happened so I want to be prepared to either try to do it or wait until everything is fixed?
Thanks a lot for your suggestions and support, you guys have helpmed a whole lot.
Sincerely
Mariae

vxlil

Hi Mariae,
as per your explanation, situation is not so critical but you are not suppose to trust on your floppy disk too much..?
Let me first tel you what are the causes of this situation.

1. CMOS settings for the server
2. Connection problem (Either data bus or power cables of the HDD)
3. HDD is failed
4. HDD Controller failed
5. BOOT.INI

dear sys ad, Mariae, now look upon the immediate solutions as..

****************************ATTENTION*********************if possible then copy all the date and system state to other system/machine/server on the lan.... so that if you face any dangerous situation in further steps .... and if you lost any or all the data then still you would be able to find one more copy*******************ATTENTION**********

*******************TOOLS***********************************Make multiple copies of that bootable floppy disk immediately and check them all and keep at least two at remote location *************TOOLS*************************

1. Check out all the settings of CMOS settings again and again..... its setting could be reason of this situation.
If this will not solve your problem then go for next step. This step will check and rectify all the CMOS setting related errors.

2. After checking all the floppy disk and if you are sure about their functionality, shutdown your server and open the tower. Remove all the connections of the HDD, Backup tape drive and FDD (but do it step by step and remember their exact place of connection).If you know which one is the primary HDD and which one is the secondary then just connect primary hdd and all the tape drives and fdd and boot the server. If everything goes fine and in this case your are able to boot the machine from OS and able to access the lan.... etc.... then again shutdown the server properly. Now connect second HDD (secondary one of the mirror set). Boot the server and check it out weather Disk admin displays it or not. This step will check and rectify all the HDD connection related errors.

If this will not solve your problem then go for next step.

3. At this situation as if we have already done some hardware level troubleshooting... now we have to go for some more hardware check.....
try to install (connect) primary/secondary hdd to another pc/system check weather they are detectable over their or not....... if system is able to detect these hdd then they are working fine and problem with your controller or data bus of the hdd. And if there is also same problem then your HDD is failed and use less now.

4. To check wether the controllers are functioning or not you have to contact to your hardware dealer/support people.

5. Now Mriae.. its time to go for software related troubleshooting if you are through with all the about steps. This step will not help you to get ride of hardware related issues if you have (HDD/controller related issues). As you are booting your server by using floppy disk...... to make it bootable from present hard drive itself.... just see the boot.ini of the floppy drive ... note it down on the paper correctly... do not even make any mistake of English even of caps and small types....... now search boot.ini on the current hard drive which is still live but you was not able to boot the machine with that...... copy the original one with different name on the same drive and with same name on other floppy drive. Dot the changes in the boot.ini of the Hard Drive. Reboot the system. (Keep in mind that boot.ini is hidden and read-only by-default).If your system is up without any more requirement of floppy drive ..... then now you can go for further adding of new Hard Drive as replacement of the old one if the old one is failed.

**********Mere booting system with floppy disk will not make any damage to your data at any condition/situation.***************************************

Now move further and checkout which one is the culprit.

If you have any issues please add your comments.... or reply me at mfmithani@hotmail.com

Waiting for reply.....comments
all the best
vxlil

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vxlil

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Mariae

ASKER

I apologize for taking so long to come back to this question, but the only way I could get my server to keep working was to boot up from the disk and then from then on, I left it there , got the new server with windows 2000 and have made all the migration necessary to have all my applications and data from windows nt server to the windows 2000 server, finally I think I got everything and came back to check on this computer, and as I rebooted, this time it gives me this error."Windows NT could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt." <winnt root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe.
Please reinstall a copy of the above file, but it will not do anything else, it stays here, I tried to reboot with the VGA mode and the same thing happens, how do I get to the dos command to copy this file and try rebooting with no problems?
Thanks for your patience and support.
Sincerely
Maria

CleanupPing

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