The software raid solutions of Windows 2003 is designed to only allow access to your mirrored data. For example you can install the mirrored disk into another working system to access the folders. It is not designed to be a bootable recovery solution in case the primary disk fails. Simply taking the good working drive and trying to boot from it will fail. You should be able to boot from a boot disk but not boot the mirrored drive itself.

The first most likely problem is that the mirrored drive does not have a MBR. This can be fixed using your Windows Server CD and booting to the recovery console. There you can use the FIXMBR command to write a Master Boot Record to your mirrored drive. Using the Recovery Console will also verify if the mirrored drive has a working system as it will show up as a Windows installation and you will be asked for your Windows Admin password to get access to the console.

You also might not have a proper boot.ini file. You can check this using the recovery console's bootcfg command. For me it worked but I would not rely on this in an emergency. I had simply wanted to move my Windows 2003 installation to a bigger disk so I always had a good backup to fall back on. Normally I would use Acronis workstation to clone my drive but for some reason it would just restart (when booting from the CDROM) everytime I tried to clone my Windows Server's dynamic disk partition.

NOTE: If you are tying to simply duplicate your drive, be sure to not break the mirror with both drives connected. If you do so then one of the drives will receive a new drive letter and probably not be able to boot with it. You should always break the mirror with one of the drives already removed.

Tags: windows, mirror