DL385 will not boot from drives used in identical server

[CJACKSON_1]

We are trying to do some DR testing on servers. Here is what we have tried and the results we get.

1 - Built test Windows 2008 64-bit server OS on an HP DL385-G5
*Mirrored OS
*fully patched, on the domain, Trend, etc…

2 - Spare HP DL385-G5 to be used as the hardware we would like to move the mirrored OS to
*exact same server, purchased at the same time for DR
*we made sure to clear any RAID controller settings, etc..

3 - We then move the drives from test server to the spare server. Start it up and server recognizes the drives and copies the RAID configuration to the controller. It then continues to boot into Windows server 2008 just fine.

4 - We down the server and boot to an HP SmartStart cd so we can go in and use HP's RAID configuration utility to prove that the configuration is on the controller.

5 - Next we bring the server back up but it errors out at the P400 controller initialization section in the startup with the following error:

***Controller Self Test Failure***

6 - OS then fails to load

So our thought process was that we should have been able to just move a valid drive set to a new server and it would serve as a quick turn-around DR solution. Has anyone tried this ??? Are we missing something ?? To me it is almost like the controller card has a unique identifier, what was loaded in NVRAM when the drives were put in worked until the next reboot and then the controller did a test to compare what is in NVRAM to it's hardware and found a controller UID mismatch ????

[TTr]

> ***Controller Self Test Failure***

This appears to be a hardware failure error. It might have nothing to do with the disks that you moved around. You can re-seat the controller and try again. if it still fails, call HP for service.

[Jimmy Vance]

You can generally move drives around between different systems that have a Smart Array Controller. I do this on a regular basis. All the RAID information is stored in the RIS area on each hard disk, the information is not stroed on the controller. The only thing you need to keep an eye on is the controller firmware version. You need to make sure the system your moving the drives to is at the same firmware level or newer as newer firmware can read information on drives configured with older firmware, but older firmware cannot read newer firmware configured drives.