controlling visible partitions under Win2003 setup

[jo rose_1]

Hello,
I am currently trying to come up with an Altiris script (Compaq RDP 1.5 or 1.6) to boot to and then install Win2003 to a SAN presented volume - (Part iv) below is where I'm having a problem)

i) set hardware configuration
ii) deploy a DOS_ONLY.IMG image to an existing SAN volume
iii) copy all windows 2003 install files plus SAN adapter-specific drivers from $OEM$.
iv) present only ONE copy of the SAN volume to Win2003 setup - this seems to be necessary in order for the 'ExtendOEMPartition=xxxx' switch in order to work - we require an 8GB C drive partion to be available on the SAN - the actual total size of the volume presented to this server is 18GB.
v) the rest of the build is then completed using a standard script which I know works ok...

My question is this - is there a way to force the SAN driver to only see a single path to the SAN volume, thus making Win2003 think that there is only one partition there ??

At the moment, the volume which the DOS_ONLY.IMG file is happily deployed to shows up TWICE under Windows 2003 server setup.

The symptom at the moment of this problem is that the ExtendOEMPartition= switch fails (silently) and I am left with a 2GB partition which will not boot.

Also, does anyone else have a working copy of a file called 'FCDriverBootSupportRDP-1-40_1-50.zip' ? I have managed to unzip this file, run the cscript command to install the files onto our build server, but the BFSJobs.bin file will not import under Altiris, claiming that it can't read a file called ~evttimes.dat . This ZIP file is accompanied by a PDF which describes the method and I have been trying to follow this as far as possible ...

Hardware : HP DL360G2 ; emulex LP9802DC HBA
SAN : SANswitch 2/16 ; HP EVA
OS : Windows 2003 EE

Any ideas, hints or tips (or solutions !) would be very welcome.

Regards
Jo Rose
Systems Engineer
NTL
joseph.rose@ntl.com

[Uwe Zessin]

iv) is accomplished by setting up the zoning in the SANswitch(es) so that the server has only one path to the virtual disk.

[jo rose_1]

Hello,
I realise that this can be achieved by zoning, but I wanted to find a way to do it through a build script. After all, I want the multiple paths to be visible once the server has been installed (for redundancy) but not at setup time.

A utility such as lputilnt.exe is able to distinguish between different fabrics (since each has its own ID) so how is it that Windows 2003 setup can't tell that it is seeing the same presentation of the same volume through TWO fabrics ?

I am trying to achieve this - setup needs to see the presented volume only once, so it needs to stop scanning once it has found that volume.

Is this possible ?

regards
Jo Rose
Systems Engineer
NTL
p.s. a tech case has also been logged with Emulex on this issue, so will update the forum if they reply with a solution