asalisbury
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booting from a mirrored hard disk on a Windows 2000 Server domain controller
I have a Windows 2000 Server domain controller with two physical 36 gb SCSI hard disks, which were mirrored until about a month ago. The disks were mirrored until about a month ago, when I went through windows disk management and broke the mirror. There was a botched software install on the primary drive, and I would now like to remove it completely and replace it with the mirror drive from a month ago. How can I do this?
I've tried simply swapping the current drive out and replacing it with the mirror from last month. But, while "preparing network connections..." Windows kicks back an lsass.exe error...it is my guess that this mirror drive is not booting properly because the drive (consisting of a primary and extended partition) was lettered E: & F: and the Windows installation on the drive is looking for C: & D:? Maybe thats totally off base, but any help would be appreciated! This problem is rather urgent so maximum points will be given.
I've tried simply swapping the current drive out and replacing it with the mirror from last month. But, while "preparing network connections..." Windows kicks back an lsass.exe error...it is my guess that this mirror drive is not booting properly because the drive (consisting of a primary and extended partition) was lettered E: & F: and the Windows installation on the drive is looking for C: & D:? Maybe thats totally off base, but any help would be appreciated! This problem is rather urgent so maximum points will be given.
Can you get the machine to boot at all? What is the exact error message you are getting?
ASKER
Yes, the machine does boot properly, goes through the Windows 2000 Server startup screen, and launches into the GUI. Then windows starts its initialization process, and at "preparing network connections..." it halts, never giving me a login prompt. The error dialog that pops up has the title "lsass.exe":
"Directory Services could not start because of the following error: The system cannot find the file specified. Error Status: 0xc000000f. Please click OK to shutdown the system and reboot into the Directory Services Restore Mode, check the event log for more detailed information."
"Directory Services could not start because of the following error: The system cannot find the file specified. Error Status: 0xc000000f. Please click OK to shutdown the system and reboot into the Directory Services Restore Mode, check the event log for more detailed information."
It would seem that Windows 2000 cannot find the NTDS.DIT file.
I found this link at the Microsoft site regarding the problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;240362
How good are your backups?
I found this link at the Microsoft site regarding the problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;240362
How good are your backups?
ASKER
I've read through that article already, I'm under the impression that the REASON it can't find the ntds.dit file (the file IS on this drive where it belongs) is because the drive lettering is different, and %systemroot% is set to c:\winnt, but the actual system root is d:\winnt. Is there some utility I can use that will safely check/change the drive letter outside of windows? Again, this is just my educated guess as to what the problem is...windows could have done something I'm not aware of when I manually broke the mirror originally.
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ASKER
Thanks! It looks like the recovery console is the tool I'm looking for, it didn't even occur to me to check the various commands there...live and learn I guess!
Thanks again!
Thanks again!
Glad I could help, and thanks for the grade and points!