Recovery with NT mirroring

I have a test server set up with NT 4 and have mirrored a drive to practice disaster recovery.
In testing to see that I can recover from a primary drive failure, my mirrored drive starts and runs from a boot floppy but will not start independently from the boot floppy. I have modified the boot.ini on the mirrored drive.
Is it possible to take the mirrored drive and convert it to be the primary drive?
I would appreciate any advice.

Doug

 

Here is how Microsoft says to do it.

The reason for all the mess contained in the above article (breaking and remaking mirrors) is the shadow disk, the surviving member of the mirror, the member that was not the active partition, is missing the Master Boot Record (MBR). You need to boot from the floppy, set the old shadow as active, and put a blank drive in the box to allow re-creation of the mirror set as this somehow, magically, creates a proper MBR on the new primary disk.

You might get by with using the msdos fdisk /mbr command to take care of the issue but it won't always work. It literally writes a new MBR but ignores the partition table that is part of the same section of the drive.

The fixmbr command that you can use with the 2K recovery console will do a proper job on 2K and probably NT4. I think you can boot with a 2K server disk, go to the recovery console, and do the MBR repair that way. But not positive. Still and all, if you are playing with a mirror and have a safe copy of the original, maybe you could find out and let us know.

 

mbr repair on nt4

Hi Newt... thanks for your reply... I have some Nt4 workstations that also would not boot unless I use a floppy, and I'm trying to figure out how to use "fdisk /mbr" for these (or equiv. in w98), but can't do that... so maybe I'll try the w2k server route next week if I get a chance... thanks for presenting the possibility... if anyone else finds out or knows, or knows of another way to rebuild the mbr................ please post!

Fred