DP Express, DVD/CD Bare Metal DR process & 0x7b errors

[marius402]

Hi,

I am having issues with DPexpress with baremetal recovery. I have the following testbed that I am working on (this problem has been repeated on two other servers):

- ML350 Dual CPU (Tried DL380 G1 & G4 as well)
- 146GB SCSI HDD (tried on plain SCSI & SA642)
- W2k3 Std (Also tried W2k Std & Novell 6.5 SP5)
- CD-Writer

I do a normal backup with DPexpress as described for DR backup. After the backup I insert a new HDD into the server and try to restore the created CD DR image. DPe creates the original partitions and copies the files to the HDD without problems. But when you restart the server it starts with the W2k3 recovery console and then blue screens with a 0x0000007B error, which is disk drive not found error. I have tried it without the SA controller to verify that it is not drivers required for the SA controller that causes this problem.

I have tested this on a non-SCSI server with IDE drives and the server restored without a problem. I have also done a DR tape solution and it works with OBDR support as well. Unfortunately the customer uses 15 x Windows/Novell and a VLS6109. DP6 is also being used but does not support bare metal recovery at this point in time, hence the DPe co-installation

Any suggestions will be appreciated, but time is limited

Regards

Marius

[Marino Meloni_1]

I had similar problem with OBDR in the past, and the error is due to the fact that Windows do not contain the drivers for the controller.
there should be a way during the recovery to add specific drivers, but as I never try DP express bare recovery I cannot tell you where is this option. if you have during the first boot of the os the usual blue screen of the installation, try to press F6 this usualy allow to add specific drivers before the 32 bit kernel is loaded and crash due to disk access

marino

[marius402]

I have done some further testing on this now as well. I did a fresh installation of the server from the Smart Start CD of W2k3 with only DPX loaded afterwards. The backups completed and I could recover the disk to the point where DPX would restore additional data from the DVD to the server. DPX completes the DR recovery and says that it has completed the restore, the server will now restart to finish the DR procedure. At this point the server restarts as it should, but then starts with the DR procedure again? This loops the whole time without the DR procedure completing at any time.

Thanx

Marius