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.