Create an MBR on secondary plex

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I have a HP Proliant ML350 g6 server running windows 2008 std R2. This server had two hardware arrays in it. One array was a raid 0 with 1 physical drive running raid 0. The other array is 5 physical drives and setup as raid 5. Well, the first array drive with the OS got an expected failure. At that time the current admin put in another drive and was unable to recreate the array with the hardware array. So he mirrored the drive to another drive using software raid (disk management).

So finally the primary drive fails. After rebooting the server we were unable to boot from the second drive. I did some research online and found that software raid does not recreate the MBR on the secondary drive. So I created a floppy boot disk from the recovery console on the windows 2008 disk and was able to boot the server.

So now I am trying to figure out how to make this drive bootable without using the floppy or losing the data currently on this drive. I have done tons of research and have found several solutions with most of them contradicting previous solutions.

So far I believe this is the best link I have found but when instructions tell you to hold your breath and restart I am not very confident.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1813508

If anyone has any suggestions for me that would be highly appreciated.

Best Answer

I would agree w/ what @ewwhite said insofar as you have a really non-ideal situation here.

If the other admin was kind enough to mirror the "System Reserved" partition to the other disk you could probably get away w/ booting a Windows 2012 setup DVD and running: bootsect /nt60 ALL That'll write a Windows "6.0" MBR to the disk, which in turn will attempt to load the Windows boot loader from the "System Reserved" partition.

If the other admin didn't mirror the "System Reserved" partition then you have no boot loader on the disk (since on x64 versions of Windows the bootloader "lives" in this separate partition). If that's the case then you're best off adding another disk, creating the System Reserved partition and installing the bootloader into it, then mirroring the OS partition onto the remaining space on that disk.

Once you've got the system booting from a disk with a "System Reserved partition you can think about breaking the Windows software mirror and going back to a hardware-based mirror.

If you've got to prepare a new disk to receive the bootloader I'd add the new disk and use diskpart to create the "System Reserved" partition like so:

LIST DISK
SELECT DISK <choose ordinal of new disk>
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY SIZE=100
SELECT PARTITION 1
FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK
ACTIVE
ASSIGN LETTER=x:

You can do a bcdboot C:\windows /s x: to install the bootloader to this new volume. You can then mirror the boot OS partition into the remaining free space.

Once you've got a bootloader installed and the OS partition mirrored you'll be safe to attempt to boot from this disk. Not having your exact configuration in front of my I'm certain that I can't give you all the correct step-by-step commands, but it's definitely feasible to get a bootable environment running again. Likely you're going to become very familiar with the bcdboot command.

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