Marking drive inactive

I came across a server that had 4 1TB drives in it.  Normally, you would create a hardware RAID5 with the 4 drives and the OS would only see a single drive and it would be redundant.  Well, whoever setup this server didn’t know about servers and each 1TB drive is just that… a drive.  In the OS, they made two software RAID1 mirrors.  Two for the OS and two for Data.  Well, both OS drives were marked as active, but since one was missing the MBR, system info, etc.. it wouldn’t boot anyway.  The other issue is that the server didn’t know which drive to boot off of.  So, when you restarted the server, it would give you a “no OS found” error and you would have to manually pick the drive to boot from.

To fix this, I marked the non-primary OS mirror drive as inactive, and here is how:

C:\Users\Administrator> diskpart

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status      Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online       932 GB    31 MB
  Disk 1    Online       932 GB    31 MB
  Disk 2    Online       932 GB    31 MB
  Disk 3    Online       932 GB    31 MB
  Disk 4    Online       932 GB    17 MB

DISKPART> select disk 0
DISKPART> uniqueid disk

Disk ID: 2C27F046

DISKPART> select disk 1
DISKPART> uniqueid disk

Disk ID: 744EE598

DISKPART> select disk 2
DISKPART> uniqueid disk

Disk ID: A7010F2C

Disk ID: ADISKPART> select disk 3
DISKPART> uniqueid disk

Disk ID: A7010F32

DISKPART> select disk 4
DISKPART> uniqueid disk

Disk ID: 8318666E

DISKPART> select disk 2

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary            931 GB  1024 KB

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> inactive

DiskPart marked the current partition as inactive.