windows server secondary plex or windows server default

Question

I am new to handling issues on server.

when my system tried to reboot I could see two installables to boot from.

1. windows server 2012- current os
2. windows server secondary plex.

So when ever there is a system restart the system it stops at this screen. And since I am connecting to this server using RDP I have to wait for the hetzner console to click on of the os to boot.

Even though the current os is set as default and time given is 30 sec, it still waits for a user input.

So I want to know which of the two should I be using to boot and I just want one os.

Answer 1

I would assume that you have a Software RAID using your Windows Server, that's why you have two booting options, note that this is generally a very bad idea to do on production servers, I would highly recommend you to use a Hardware RAID.

Make sure that your RAID is dead before you remove and edit the boot entries, you can do that by visiting the Disk Management console of your Windows server, here's a good explanation on what to look for when you go there, if the RAID is up and running, then leave it as is, your delayed boot problem might be caused by something else.

If one of the RAID disks is dead, you will need to use the BCDEdit tool to remove the faulty reference to the Secondary Plex as follow:

• BCDEdit /enum (to show all the GUIDs of your disks)
• BCDEdit /delete "GUID"

More information can be found here about the BCDEdit command

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I succeeded with these steps:

1. Start with option "Windows server 2012 - secondary plex"
2. Login as Administrator
3. Start Disk Management (right click on Start and choose Disk management)
4. You'll see Failed Redundancy, if both disks are Online then right click on red colored disk area and choose "Reactivate Volume"
5. After some time sync is done and disks have status "Healthy", depends of size it could last for several hours