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philmc79

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Booting to SATA mirror drive on POWEREDGE 2950

I have a Dell power edge 2950 with windows 2000 server, with 2 160gb hard drives these drives are drive 0 and drive 1, they have a software mirror, drive 0 has some bad sectors on it so i wish to change it for a new one, so i need to be able to boot to drive 1, they are both SATA drives, i have listed below the boot.ini file i have made but no mater which of the boot sequences i try the server will not boot to the drive. I have made a boot floppy in the same way we use to use on the NT4 systems and that always worked on thoughs servers am i missing something

can anyone help

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect ( original )
multi(1)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect ( new line to try )
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect ( new line to try )
multi(1)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect ( new line to try )
multi(1)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect ( new line to try )

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Pber
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You have a DELL 2950 and you are using software mirroring?  The 2950 has a built in PERC5 RAID controller, are you sure you are using software mirroring because it seems like a waste to use software mirroring when you have hardware mirroring available.  

How did you configure the RAID?  From within Windows Disk Management or via the Dell Server Admistrator (or the Boot time Raid Controller setup).
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philmc79

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this server has no raid controller in it just the std SATA controler, we used the software raid from within windows 2000 to configure the mirror drives and as you said from the windows disk manager
DId you first break the software mirroring ?

If not, then that is the first step.

I hope this helps !
yes i did, but i have since got it to boot up of a floppy, using the following line in the boot.ini

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT="Mirror Windows 2000 Server rdisk(2)"

but the server will not boot without the floppy disk, it is if the partion is not set to active
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when i installed the new disk and added the mirror back the system them rebooted with out the aid of the floppy disk, think that SATA drive's behave differently than IDE disks as you cannot tell the bios which disk to boot from, they act a bit like a scsi drive but not exactley the same, but you live and learn in this game

thanks to you all