This is a variant of the current postings with a twist. KB769749 assumes the 2nd drive is still alive. In this case the primary drive has died. I have the system booting to the secondary plex via the bcdedit. The C: and the D: drives were mirrored (software) within 2008. I can 'removed mirror' with the D: drive by right clicking, clicking on 'remove mirror' and selecting the 'Missing Drive.' However, this fails when removing the mirror from the C: drive. I receive the error "The specified plex is a the current system or boot plex." I have verified in with BCDEdit that the 2ndary drive is now the default boot plex. I can reboot the machine just fine with no involvement at the keyboard. Again, all the discussion thus far has been around both drives still being present. This is causing a problem because Volume Shadow copy fails so long as the mirror is failing. While I can get a replacement drive, I wanted to backup the C: drive while awaiting for the hardware. This seems to be 'obvious' that one would run into this scenario but thus far nothing on the web addresses this issue. So, the question is: How to remove the mirror of the boot drive C:, while the 1st drive has failed (diskpart has drive as missing) without having a replacement drive.D-B-S