ML350E gen 8 with B120i Raid ..Bare Metal Restore

[laserbill]

Hello.

I have been trying to create a bare metal image of a ML350E gen 8 Server with the B120i Raid controller with 
2 X 500GB WD SATA drives configured as raid 1. Its running Microsoft SBS 2011.

Booting with the Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 CD only sees the two physical drives and not the raid array.

After re booting from the Acronis media the sever blue screens and that's it...its in a loop. SBS recovery DVD cant repair because it cant find a drive to repair. Its a re install.

I'm just happy it wasn't at one of my customers servers.

I have given up on Acronis after spending a few days going round in circles and no help from Acronis.

All I could find on Google was Acronis 11.5 has no support for the B120i Controller because the driver isn't open source.

Can any one recommend a bare metal solution that can see the raid array from a boot CD to create and/or restore an image without screwing the raid.

The only work around I have come up with seems risky.

It involves a spare drive and caddy. Basically pull one of the mirrored drives before switch on,

let the start-up ACU discover the missing drive....Replace with spare...Raid rebuilds and after an 
hour or so the raid is rebuilt and ready to go....Tuck the pulled drive away for a rainy day.

Thanks for any help

[Andrea-UK]

Hello,

I faced exactly the same issue but I managed to solve it :)

Create a PE Based Recovery CD -- When it starts load the B120i driver and the raid will be seen.

The B120i driver should be W2008 (32Bit version) which you can download from HP.

I used cp017225 and it works fine.

You can integrate the driver into the PE driver into the recovery CD but I decided it was not worth the effort.

Once the driver is loaded Trueimage sees the raid perfectly and performs back or bare metal restore without issue.

Hope that helps

Andrea