Disk Administrator Mirror causes autochk program not found - skipping autocheck
Raymond
On an NT4, SP6a system I added an extra hard drive for mirroring with
Disk Administrator. The mirroring of the C: drive (FAT) went fine.
When I selected the D: drive (NTFS) and an unused partition on the
other disk and selected Mirror from the Fault tolerance menu, the
drive-letter D: disappeared. Breaking the mirror showed a G: drive on
the second disk, but still no drive-letter D: on the first disk. I
could not assign the letter D myself; it was not available in the
list.
I rebooted. Now the system does not start anymore. I get the blue
screen with a message "autochk program not found". Then it reboots
itself.
I read somewhere in a post that maybe some bytes in the mbr are
corrupt ("the 4 byte NT signature at positions 440 through 443
decimal"). Can this be it? How can I change bytes in the mbr? Can I
download a tool to do that.
I hope someone can help me. The server is a live server that clients
have their websites on and need for their email.
Many thanks for any help in advance.
Raymond.
Pegasus (MVP)
"Raymond" <sa...@xs4all.nl> wrote in message
news:2c7e27b3.03122...@posting.google.com...
Try booting your system from a WinNT boot disk:
- Format a floppy disk on some WinNT/Win2000 PC.
Don't do it on a Win9x PC - it won't work.
- Copy these files from the \i386 folder of your WinNT CD
to A:\
ntldr
ntdetect.com
- Boot your machine with a Win98 boot disk from
www.bootdisk.com.
- Run ntfsdos.exe (www.sysinternals.com).
- Insert your WinNT boot disk and type this command:
type c:\boot.ini > a:\boot.ini
Now boot your machine with your WinNT boot disk and
report the result here.
Raymond
winNT boot disk, I get:
- OS Loader V4.00
- After 3 seconds the default is chosen
- NTDETECT V 4.0 Checking Hardware ...
- OS Loader V4.01
- blue startup screen
- error: autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK
- it reboots
The NTFSDOS mounted 3 NTFS partitions:
0x80:2 as drive: D
0x80:3 as drive: E
0x80:4 as drive: F
Those are indeed the partitions I used to have. I can look at their contents
(through NTFSDOS) and all seems normal.
The C: drive is a FAT drive, with win98.
I also tried clearing the high bit of byte 1C2 of the mbr, as advised by
microsoft in their article "Recovering from Stop 21A Caused by Disk Mirror
Sets" (
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;139843&Product=nts40
). I changed the byte from 86 to 06 with Norton Diskedit. This didn't help.
I think this byte only tells that the first partition is mirrored; it was
86, meaning a mirrored FAT partition and only the first partition is FAT.
The whole problem started when I was mirroring the second partition (drive
D: NTFS). Is there such a byte on disc telling that the second partition is
mirrored. Maybe I can clear that one.
When setting up the mirror for drive D with Disk Administrator, the
driveletter vanished in Disk Administrator. In Explorer I could still see
drive D. Does winNT need a drive letter to boot from this disk? The winNT OS
is on drive D.
For information, here are the contents of my boot.ini:
[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows NT Server Version 4.00"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows NT Server Version 4.00
[VGA mode]" /basevideo /sos
C:\="Microsoft Windows"
I hope for help,
Raymond.
"Pegasus (MVP)" <I....@fly.com> wrote in message
news:bs33lg$r19$1...@arachne.labyrinth.net.au...
Pegasus (MVP)
Try renaming the file "system" to "system.bad", then
"system.alt" to "system".