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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (2534)	9/16/1998 1:21:00 PM
From: Spots	Respond to of 14778

>>drive path failures If you can get far enough that Disk Manager recognizes the disk configuration, you probably don't have the problem to which I was referring, but since you ask I'll describe it. I dug my own pitfall (with an alligator at the bottom <g>) when I installed NT on partition two of the nominal C drive (the master disk on the primary IDE controller). As it happened at the time, this labeled the NT resident partition (system root) as G. Now if a disk fails or I change the disk configuration, usually I get a blue screen from NT. I finally figured out that this is due to the system root partition not being labeled G in the natural order of things after changing the disk config, i.e., as DOS would assign the drive letters (assuming it could see NTFS partitions). For instance, I recently had a power hit which killed the NT Server where I keep my mirrored data. I pulled a mirror and temporarily replaced a disk on my workstation to try to recover the data. NT wouldn't read the half-mirror (another story, I'll try to post why later), so in effect I had just relabeled system root as F. NT is supposed to redirect everything to %SystemRoot, but it doesn't. Blue screen time. Unfortunately, the blue screen occurs immediately after the first logon completes, and at the end of logon the current configuration, including disk letter assignments, get's written to the registry as the "last known good" configuration. Then the blue screen occurs. The upshot is that on the next reboot the last known good configuration isn't any good. It isn't any good if you retore the old disk configuration either, because, in my example, NT wrote "F"into the registry as the system root assignment. Once this happens to you, blue better be your favorite color, 'cause you're gonna see a lot of it. That's when you learn all about emergency repair disks. Anything that alters the drive letter of system root will potentially cause this problem. I must say that I don't always have the problem when I change configuration, though. I don't know just what precise detail triggers or avoids it. Apparently you've avoided it, even though you swapped the master and slave (I'd be looking at pastel blue in your shoes, I bet). Anyway this doesn't seem to be your immediate problem, but possibly you or someone may get some good out of this post. Goodness knows it's cost me enough time learning about it. I'll try to post a bit more on mirrors and NT repairs later. Spots