Greetings all, I'm rather new to windows software mirroring. I have successfully created a mirror in a test environment with 2 20gb IDE drives. i am trying to recover from a mock drive failure, and am not having any luck. I have created a boot disk by formating the drive and copying the current ntldr, boot.ini, netdetect.com files over to it and trying to boot too it with only one drive attached. It gives me an error msg about hardware and boot drive problems. both drives are fine. I made sure that they were good before i started. Both drives are on the samechannelon the motherboard and set to cable select. Any suggestions or is there a step by step article on how to correct this problem. Currently if the main drive failes i cannot boot the machine from the mirrored drive. I've tried to understand some of theMicrosoftarticles but they seem to be vague. any help would be appreciated. thanks Brian

Hi Brian, If you try mirroring the system or the boot driver with software mirroring (RAID1), I think you don't copy the current NTLDR, boot.ini, and NTdetect.com from one driver to the other as these system files will kept on both of the replicas of the RAID1 volumes. The system will recover and detect these files afterwards if we recover the failed mirror system partition properly afterwards. I suggest that you refer to the following KB article to mirror the system and boot partition in windows 2000 How To Mirror the System and Boot Partition (RAID1) in Windows 2000 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/302969 Create and test a mirrored system or boot volume http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738132.aspx If the main drive fails, please refer to the following steps to recover a failed mirrored system partition. Meanwhile, it is recommended that you make the 2 drives on separate IDE channel on the motherboard. Steps to Recover a Failed Mirrored System/Boot Partition http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120227/EN-US/ Hope it helps.This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hello David,Sorry for the late reply.Thanks for the information i did read the articles.However i am now trying to get the mirror running with 2 80 gb drives but one of them is showing up about 6gb smaller than the original. I think that this is because of how windows reads the diffrent manufactures. Is it possible to setup up the raid as having the main drive as 80gb and have the second as 160gb. will this work.reason why i ask is because the add mirror option does not show up when i try to select it.thanks again for your help.Brian.

Hi Brian,To add the mirrored volume, I would like to suggest that you use the disk from the same manufacture with the similiar model. Thus , we can ensure that the mirrored volume can be initilized with the best performance as wished.Besides, if you want to setup the mirrored volume with the 80G main drive and the the other 160GB drive, please check that there is an unallocated space on the second 160GB disk which is at least in the size with the volume that you want to establish with on the 80GB main drive.Hope this information will be helpful.This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.