Hi, I'm trying to understand a recent problem I had with a software mirror in windows 2008 r2. The mirror was configured "after the fact", meaning, a second drive was added after the original install/drive had been in place for a period of time. When the second drive was added I simply converted the drives to dynamic and via server manager configured them as a mirror. The problem I just encountered was that the primary drive had some hardware issues and it forced us to boot off the second drive. This worked fine but on a subsequent reboot the boot manager went completely missing. I tried a variety of things to fix it, including startup repair, bootsec and the bcdrebuild commands. What ended up being the problem was that the "system resesrved" partition on the primary drive was corrupted. I ran a chkdsks against it and then was able to get startup repair to fix things and boot. What I'm trying to understand is where the system reserved partition plays into this. In doing research it seems like it's not supposed to be absolutely essential and could be removed, but it obviously contains boot files that are needed. My configuration obviously does not work well because only the primary drive has a system reserved partition (and it can't be mirrored from what I can tell), making the primary drive a requirement to boot, which makes the software mirror ineffective. Can someone shed some light on how this should be configured and what the system reserved partition actually does? Thanks.

This article may help. How to set up dynamic boot partition mirroring on GUID partition table (GPT) disks in Windows Server 2008 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951985/ Regards, Dave Patrick .... Microsoft Certified Professional Microsoft MVP [Windows]