ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL)
1748019 Members
4719 Online
108757 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Re: BOOT.INI on BL3xp servers with 2x60GB ATA disks

 
DaMiBu
Advisor

BOOT.INI on BL3xp servers with 2x60GB ATA disks

I have about 100 BL30/35p blades all with 2 x 60GB ATA disks mirrored in Windows Server 2003. I am looking for a more seamless way to recover from a primary disk failure where the systems will boot from the 2nd disk without having to boot to the recovery console to change the boot.ini.

Anyone have a smart or clever way to do this so that the process is more automatic.

6 REPLIES 6
Oleg Koroz
Honored Contributor

Re: BOOT.INI on BL3xp servers with 2x60GB ATA disks

DaMiBu
Advisor

Re: BOOT.INI on BL3xp servers with 2x60GB ATA disks

the servers are BL30p and BL35p with Non-hot plug ATA disk drives which have no hardware RAID capabilities.

I know I could replace with dual SAS drives and a SAS mezzanine card to do hardware raid however this is a daunting and expensive proposition for 100 severs (and I do not thing the Xeon models support SAS)



Oleg Koroz
Honored Contributor

Re: BOOT.INI on BL3xp servers with 2x60GB ATA disks

I believe that you need different system board in BL35 in order to Upgrade from ATA to SAS
DaMiBu
Advisor

Re: BOOT.INI on BL3xp servers with 2x60GB ATA disks

I know - but as I said I do not want to replace 100 of these things as I would need 200 new disk drives and 100 mezzanine cards to get hardware raid i.e. about $100k for the hardware! This is what I am trying to avoid.

I want a QUICK way to fail-over a software mirror in a BL30p or a BL35p Proliant server that already have ATA disks installed.
Pieter 't Hart
Honored Contributor

Re: BOOT.INI on BL3xp servers with 2x60GB ATA disks

is it an option to change the boot.ini in advance ?
add an extra entry that points to the second disk as bootdisk.
then at boottime you just have to select the second configuration to boot from the other disk.

Pieter
DaMiBu
Advisor

Re: BOOT.INI on BL3xp servers with 2x60GB ATA disks

but if the first disk is bad it will not read the boot.ini. Can the boot order in the BL35/30p servers be set to boot from the 2nd disk if the first has failed? Also there is manual intervention required as the default is the first (and bad) disk.