Member Avatar for Richy321

Im looking to mirror a disk in Server 2008, ive set it up to mirror using the Computer management screen and it all seems alright.
Ive tried pulling out the drive with the OS on and it obviously blue screens and you have to select to boot the mirrored operating system once restarted.
The problem is I want the drive to automatically recover from the other drive when it goes down, without having to restart/interrupt the network.

Is this possible/How can I do it?

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Dani AI

Generated

For (and following ), the missing pieces are usually the boot code and BCD store on the mirror plus proper controller/BIOS hot‑plug support. A Windows software mirror (dynamic disk) can boot from either disk, but only if the second disk contains a valid MBR/boot files and an active system partition and your controller will tolerate a hot removal. Below are practical steps to make the mirror actually bootable and a short troubleshooting checklist.

Quick procedure (run from an elevated command prompt; be careful which disk/partition numbers you pick):

diskpart
list disk
select disk <mirror-disk-number>
list partition
select partition <system-or-reserved-partition-number>
assign letter=S
exit
bcdboot C:\Windows /s S:
diskpart
select disk <mirror-disk-number>
select partition <same-partition-number>
active
exit

If needed (from recovery / installation media): 

bootsect /nt60 S: /mbr

Test by setting the BIOS/boot order to the mirror disk and booting. If that succeeds, try a controlled failover test (maintenance window) and confirm the server stays up when you remove a drive.

Troubleshooting / cautions:

  • If a 100MB "System Reserved" partition exists, it must be handled (mirror it or put boot files on the mirrored Windows partition).
  • Many consumer SATA controllers do not support true hot‑swap; test on this hardware before relying on it in production.
  • If the server blue‑screens immediately when a drive is removed, the boot loader/MBR was only on the removed disk or the controller/driver cannot handle hot removal. Check Event Viewer and the controller/BIOS settings.
  • Always snapshot/export the BCD and have full backups before modifying boot/MBR.

If hardware-level no-downtime is required, a controller that presents the pair as a single logical drive avoids these boot-file problems — that is what was pointing toward.

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for jbennet

Not using software RAID i dont think, but its possible using hardware RAID on most server systems.

Member Avatar for Richy321

Any ideas how I would go about this?

Member Avatar for jbennet

do you have hardware mirroring capability?

Member Avatar for Richy321

How would I find this out? what hardware would i need? As far as I know, I have standard Raid hard-drives.

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