jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Nov 20 11:28:54 CST 2007
Michael, I am not sure I understand. I have a system with the OS itself on a raid drive, running on a dedicated raid controller card. That works exactly as expected and I like it - raid 6 protection etc. I also have a pair of older drives which probably (the details are hazy now) had the OS on them originally, which run off of the raid controller on the motherboard. These two disks form a raid 1 array (mirrored) with nothing visible on it, and yes I have told windows explorer to show system and hidden files. However if I disconnect these two older drives from the motherboard (remove power or remove the SATA connector) windows does not boot. IIRC there is a master boot record that is written to a drive that is where windows goes for the very first "bootstrap" code. It then tells windows where the rest of the OS is located. I thought there was a "sys" command (in the old days anyway) that would write this master boot record and perhaps a couple of other files to a hard disk and that you could just "sys" a drive to make it the drive with that MBR stuff. If I can do that to the C: drive on the Areca dedicated raid card then I could boot directly off of that C: drive and get rid of these two older drives. If they ever fail I am doomed. Yea they are raid one but I do NOT want to be trying to rebuild a mirror just for some hidden MBR that should have been moved long ago. Unfortunately I do not know as much about that stuff as I once did and have so far been unable to discover how to change from "booting" off these older drives to booting off the new. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Michael Bahr Sent: Monday, November 19, 2007 10:04 PM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT: make volume bootable Try this: 1. Navigate to the Disk Management console. 2. Right-click the grey 'Disk Description' pane that is located to the left of the Color-coded volume panes. 3. Select, Upgrade to Dynamic Disk.' Note you will have to reboot not once, but twice. If that does not work then reformat. Backup all your data then reformat. The big negative about RAID is that it is one-way. Once you set up as RAID you can not go back without lots of pain. Mike.. > I have a Windows 2003 server with an dedicated Areca raid controller. > The system disk C: is on the raid controller, however another pair of > disks are somehow involved in the boot process. These two disks are > talking (SATA) directly to the motherboard SATA ports (using Raid1 via > the motherboard raid controller), and to look at them there is nothing > on them. However if I disconnect these disks then the system gives > the old "boot disk not found" > when the computer is reset. That implies that this pair of disks (a > single > Raid1 volume) contains boot files required to actually boot the > computer even though the C: drive itself is on the Areca controller. > > How do I set the C: drive to be the boot drive and contain whatever > these files are that are currently housed on this extra pair of disks? > > John W. Colby > Colby Consulting > www.ColbyConsulting.com > > -- > AccessD mailing list > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com