server 2000 not booting

[Salesmonkey]

I'm doing server maintenance for one of my favorite clients. My frustration here, therefore, is compounded because I really like these people! They have recommended me to several other accounts, they are very reasonable about what they want and when they want it, and they pay me on time. I like them so much that for Fat Tuesday I brought them one of my home-made king cakes with cream cheese and raspberry filling.

The server in question has a hard drive that is making noise. Not the occasional "crunch, crunch" sound of a happy drive. It HOWLS in AGONY all the time. The moment I opened the door to the utility/network room I looked at my primary contact and said,
"You are in imminent danger of a primary drive failure. I need to map your backups to another drive and image your operating system RIGHT NOW."

So their data is safe, and I've put a "loaner" server in place to act as their domain controller. The problem I'm having is that I've mounted the image to a fresh new hard drive, but it won't boot! All the files are there and accessible, but the bootloader keeps saying "operating system not found". I've used the 2k recovery console to try to rebuild the boot partition, but this hasn't been successful. I really don't want to disappoint these folks, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Eric the Grey]

Could it be as easy as fdisk /mbr to repair the boot sector?

It sounds as though there is no boot sector, or a corrupt boot sector on the drive in question, and BIOS cannot find it. I'm not certain what all the repair console does even though I've used it once. Try doing it manually from the command prompt.



Eric the Grey

[Fire_on_High]

You've run into the one truly annoying thing about Win2k...its picky as heck on this sort of thing.

First off, are you sure the image grabbed everything and it's putting it in its proper, EXPECTED place? A failing hard drive might produce a screwed up image with various issues...I had to ghost mine twice the last time I made a mess of it, as the source image was my old, not so great hard drive I'd replaced for getting clicky...first time produced a bootable OS...that completely died anytime I tried to access any of the other hard drives or partitions. Second try appears to be a winner, albeit with my firewall now occasionally (2-3 times a year) causing a BSOD.

Also, did you do the necessary stuff to make sure it reset drive letters? What you're saying is NOT the failure mode this caused for me, but it's still worth bringing up in case Server simply reacts a bit differently than plain old 2k Pro.

I'll post again if I can think of anything else...I've ran 2k for a while and glad to help anyone who still uses it.

EDIT: As for why I bring up clearing the drive letters so it resets on next boot...if it's not seeing the drive you put that on as C:, or whatever it was originally installed to...

EDIT #2: Found the link I was looking for... http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

[F&R Computer Man]

The only thing i can think of to try is to do a repair install.

[Fire_on_High]

Did you ever get it working? If so, what did the trick?