MIRROR RAID Corrupt

[BOB IROC]

Ok I am in need of serious help as I do not want to have to rebuild this entire server. The short story is I have a server that has a RAID volume in RAID 0 and one of the drives failed. The server still booted just had an error of the degraded array. So I sent a replacement hard drive over to the technician in charge of the building saying to replace the drive with serial number XXXXX as that is the one marked as failed. Well I think he replaced the wrong one and tried to boot the server and then tried to swap it around and now the server is FUBAR. Now when it tries to boot I get the following error:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt

"WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM"

and suggests running the repair console. I physically removed the drives and using a USB to SATA adapter connected the drives to my workstation and the drive that is still good looks to have all the data there but I cannot get it to boot and when I try to run the repair console it gets to the part where it tries to detect previous versions of Windows and then it says it cannot continue.

Is there some way I can use this USB adaptor and repair the file system this way to get it to boot and rebuild the RAID? The set up of this server was a pain in the butt initially and would like to see if I can repair this to get it to boot.

Thank you.

[BOB IROC]

Ok I found this KB Article here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545. So I thought since I cannot do the repair method of basically these steps using the recovery console I would try and do them by connecting the drive via USB. Basically they said to backup the corrupted files and copy new ones like this:

copy c:\windows\system32\config\system c:\windows\tmp\system.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\software c:\windows\tmp\software.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\sam c:\windows\tmp\sam.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\security c:\windows\tmp\security.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\config\default c:\windows\tmp\default.bak

delete c:\windows\system32\config\system
delete c:\windows\system32\config\software
delete c:\windows\system32\config\sam
delete c:\windows\system32\config\security
delete c:\windows\system32\config\default

copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config\system
copy c:\windows\repair\software c:\windows\system32\config\software
copy c:\windows\repair\sam c:\windows\system32\config\sam
copy c:\windows\repair\security c:\windows\system32\config\security
copy c:\windows\repair\default c:\windows\system32\config\default

but when I connect the drive via a USB adaptor and try to browse to \WINDOWS\System32 I get an error that it is not accessible due to an I/O error.

I have 2 other servers built with the same hardware and running the same basic application and I wonder if I could just copy the whole system32 folder over or is there some sort of repair I can do on that.

[slgrieb]

If a couple of my recent experiences are any indication, I'm not too hopeful. I've had two similar situations in the last few months, and they didn't work out so well. In one case both drives were fully functional, but data on both drives was corrupted while the array was degraded. I suspect this was due to crappy nVidia RAID software, but I'm not sure. Even after I split the array, neither drive would boot individually. RAID Reconstructor wouldn't create a bootable image file from the pair on the original controller, and running chkdsk on the individual drives just resulted in two drives with a lot of missing data. I recovered a bunch of files in the end, but the customer still had days and days of data re-entry.

Edit: In response to your second post, you might get the system up by copying the directory, but I bet there's going to be some critical files missing that might prevent a boot. Still, not much to lose by trying it.

[CeeBee]

I wonder if he replaced the correct drive but the new one comes up as a simple (standalone) drive with a lower ID. So when the computer tries to boot it sees the drives as [new drive as #1],[old drive in array as #2].
Then multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS will point to... the new drive... which has nothing on it -> boot fail.
So make sure that the correct drive has been replaced, add the new drive in the array, start a rebuild and then try to boot...