NT will not boot

[Ayman Altounji]

I have a customer with a 1600R.
smart 2dh, 5 9.1GB U2 hard drives with 2 logical drives.
The operating system is on mirrored drive C. We recently moved the
server from one place to another, turned back on, the server wouldn't boot. The post tests passed, the drives were picked up. The server sits there with a flashing cursor in the top left cursor - black screen. the carepaq guy changed the controller, drive cage etc. to no availe. Is there any way round this apart from a system erase and a OS reinstall

Thanks

[Ayman Altounji]

At this point, all I can suggest is to be sure to FIRMLY reseat everything. This includes any hotplug power supplies and the processor module... Something may have worked loose during shipping.

[Ayman Altounji]

I have a Proliant 1600. The post tests passed, the drives were picked up. It now has a flashing cursor in the top left corner- black screen. What could be causing this.

[Ayman Altounji]

You can make your server bootable by formating a floppy using NT, and copying NTLDR,BOOT.INI,NTDETECT.COM to this disk (assuming the Boot.ini is one with the same partition information as your "DEAD" server.

I have managed to rule out all the hardware as the possible cause of the flashing cursor. It has turned out to be a corrupt Master Boot Record on the boot drive.
Unless you make a copy of this using DISKPROBE off the NT resource kit, you need to rebuild the MBR by reinstalling NT over the top of your existing build.

Hope this helps

[Ayman Altounji]

I have experienced a similar situation with a Compaq 1600, this has had the OS re-installed but the same fault re-occured shortly afterwards. Currently booting from floppy for now. We use lots of different Proliant models without this situation arising. I would be interested to know how you get on and any ideas on the Proliant 1600 and MBRs would be useful.

[Ayman Altounji]

I have also experienced this problem but on a Proliant 2500. We have cleared the ROM, then updated it. Then cleared it out again. I can boot from Floopy with files taken from the DEAD server itself. Have run the repair procedure and replaced all possible files and also reinstalled NT from scratch. Problem still occurs, seems as though the procedure to find the NTFS MBR is corrupt. Anyone any ideas.

[Ayman Altounji]

I have never had this problem with any server but have experienced the same problem with a corrupted MBR on work stations. Simple OS re installs don't really seem to rebuild the MBR. The only way I was able to resolve this was to rebuild from scratch. The following article from WIN2K Mag explains how to blow out the MBR and start from scratch.
http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Article ID=5327
Beware, this will completely strip your drive. Be sure to back everything up first.