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ARC paths

Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) names are the names seen when viewing Boot.ini and are used to locate the NT boot partition. There are two main types of ARC names, depending on whether the disks are IDE or SCSI. For IDE, the ARC names will follow this convention:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00"

The numbers that follow "multi" and "disk" should always be 0, as these are not applicable for IDE. The number following "rdisk" represents the physical disk, and the number after "partition" represents the partition on that disk where the boot files are located. So, in the above example, the boot files are located on the first physical disk, in the first partition (most likely drive C). Remember to always start with 0 when counting hard drives and CPUs.

SCSI of course has to be different. With SCSI drives that have the SCSI bios disabled, you'll usually see something like this:

scsi(0)disk(1)rdisk(x)partition(1)\ WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00"

The number after "scsi" represents the SCSI controller. The number after "disk" is the SCSI ID of the physical disk. The "rdisk" value is always 0 and the partition number is just the same as IDE, starting with 1.

So, now you're prepared to handle that bad mirror by editing your Boot.ini file on your boot disk to point to the partition needed for booting.