E60 Missing EISA partition

[Kevin Ip]

Hi:

I have a Netserver E60 with software RAID1. It's been running fine for the past year until 2 weeks ago, NT4 complainted FT was broken. The primary drive was not accessible. I was able to boot from the Pri drive however. The I re-established the mirror by removing the partitions on the shawdowed drive. Once I did that, it automatically removed the EISA partition. I was able to re-create the mirror. The same thing happened again just today and I wasn't able to boot from the shawdow drive with my NT Boot Disk. I modified the boot.ini to "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)" and tried this notation later "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)", but still no luck. It kept on complaining it's non system disk. When I tried booting directly using the shawdow drive, it just hang with a blinking cursor where the HP utility prompt would be if the EISA exisited. I still can't figure why I can't boot from the shawdow using the boot disk or directly from shawdow drive. Any help is appreciated because I have 2 identical E60 doing the same thing on the same day twice. Thank you very much.

[e4services]

Are you running a virus program? Would explain the 2 simultanious machines. This is where the mirror does not help you, a software corruption. Only a backup can help. We had our controller go off the deep end and pull a "HAL9000", corrupting the data like this. The machine started to act up, but Windows was still up. But when we rebooted it would hang and of course both disks were the same. We ended up installing a new NT on another disk just to access the data and then it happened again. At least we had a complete backup now.
We replaced the controller and disks.

[e4services]

Are you running a virus program? Would explain the 2 simultanious machines.

This is where the mirror does not help you, a software corruption. Only a backup can help. We had one customer report their controller go off the deep end and pull a "HAL9000", corrupting the data like this. The machine started to act up, but Windows was still up. But when it was rebooted, it would hang and of course both disks were the same. We ended up having them install a new NT on another disk just to access the data and then it happened again. At least we had a complete backup now.
We replaced their controller and disks.

[Kevin Ip]

Thanks for the reply. I don't have any virus software on those 2 servers. Also, I found a post in the HP site, which I can't find it anymore. It states the model of hard drive in my E60 with firmware older than certain version may go offline for no reason. Upgrade of firmware is recommended. Have you heard or read that post? The description is very closed to my problem. At this point, I am putting 2 drives on the same channel, not the one I suspect it's bad. And wait to see if that happens again. Still not sure is it the controller or drive. And there's no data corruption on either drives. The Microsoft article claiming a missing EISA partition can contribute to boot problem with shawdow. Looks like I have to locate the CD somehow.