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Small Business Server will not boot up!

So I noticed that there was a problem with my mirrored system drive so I went to do a chkdsk and rebooted and now the server will boot. I think NTLDR is missing not or something happened to the boot record. I took the drives out and hooked them up to another machine to look at them and one of them seems to be unformatted. The other has the files on it. Both are Simple Volumes, Both apear to be healthy. I cannot rejoin them as a Mirror set. How do I get back to a bootable system?

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Brian Pierce

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tigermatt

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kosness

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Ok so now it looks as if there some sort of virus corrupting the mbr. My offsite backup drive is now having problems and is inaccessable ( I downloaded a disk recovery program by EASEUS to verify the files are still there, but I have not recoved them to another disk. My 3 disk RAID where I keep all of the important data, including the most recent SBS backup. is also complaining of a critical status on the Promise Fastrack controller card. The only thing that I haven't lost yet is the original system drive, but it is not bootable. If I connect it to another machine, the sytem files are there, (but the Exchange database is on the RAID). So can I try to get the RAID up and running on a fresh install of SBS (w/o active directory) and copy off the files so I can rebuilt the RAID? I don't want to risk losing all of the data, since my offsite is now unreliable. And data recovery services are costly. What do you think?

kosness

ASKER

So I was able to boot up using an NT Fault tolerant boot disk. But the server is really slow. It seems to be choking on the "System" process. Then it is OK for a while and then does it again. The original setup was the data, applications, mailstore, and stuff on a 3 disk RAID 5 on a promise SATA card. The system drive on a softaware mirror off of the motherboard. When the one disk from the mirror went down this problem started. I figured i could install a second hardware RAID card and use it for just the system drive mirror, but according to Promise, that is not recommended. Maybe I should migrate to another server? Maybe I should build a backup server on a single RAID array? What SBS system can be made fault tolerant such that if one server went down, the other would take over? Thanks in advance.