Disk order change in windows on MSA

[DH1]

I have a proliant server with an embeded P400 and an Emulex FC controller connected to a san switch and then to an MSA2012.
The server was booted before the fiber cables were connected. Once the cables were connected I configured the luns/volumes etc on the MSA, and the configured the drives in windows which appeared in disk manager as disk2. Once the server was rebooted the MSA drive appeared as disk 0 instead of disk2, which of course doesn't work very well.
How can I force the MSA drives to something other than disk 0 so that the drives on the P400 stay at disk 0 and 1.
I have the latest HBA drive loaded for the emulex.

[Steven Clementi]

Is your HBA bios enabled? If so, try disabling it.

Did you set a lun number in the MSA web gui for the volume?



Steven

[DH1]

Bios is disabled, which helps, at least windows still loads.
A LUN number was set. Also tried changing the IRQ in the bios. Windows still scans the Emulex first and puts those drives first in the list.

[Uwe Zessin]

Dan, you wrote:
> which of course doesn't work very well.

What does that mean? Windows doesn't boot? You have an application that explicitly uses the disk number?

Maybe you can alter the disk order if you move adapters around - but maybe not.

As far as I can tell, this is just a 'cosmetic problem' and you don't need to be concerned if Windows boots.

[DH1]

If the bios on the emulex is enabled, the MSA drives become disk 0 on boot. The boot.ini refers to disk 0. Windows then fails with ntldr not found. Disable bios on emulex, MSA drives are not seen as boot devices and Windows loads sat. Only problem is once Windows is loaded, the drives are listed in the wrong order. Since the drives were initialized in windows as disk2, they are no longer available in windows. This is more than cosmetic. I can reinit the drive I suppose. Seems like it should be possible to change the order in which windows scans the controllers, which I am researching now.

[Uwe Zessin]

> they are no longer available in windows.

Sorry if I am dense, but what does that mean exactly?
No disk in the disk manager or is it offline?
And what version of Windows are we talking about?

[DH1]

Sorry, wasn't clear there. The MSA drives show up in disk manager, but as disk 0 instead of disk 2, which is how they were originally setup. Since the disk number has changed, the drive letter associated with disk 2 is not accessible.

[DH1]

Figured it out.