Proliant DL380 G4 and RIS ????

[Liz Rollet]

Hi! My company has recently converted from Dell to HP servers and are having difficulty using RIS to install Windows 2003 sp1 on the hardware. I have come across articles mentioning that the HP BIOS must be a certain version and that the firmware for the RAID controller must be up-to-date. I have verified that we have version P51 of the BIOS installed and the RAID firmware is 2.58 (the article said it must be 2.36 or higher for RIS to work).

When attempting to use RIS, I get as far as the copying of the initial Windows files and then it freezes at the screen "Setup is starting Windows". I have checked the RIS server - the BINLSVC lists no errors. The system seems to freeze; I must do a hard reboot in order to do start the process over or check settings.

We have not run into these problems with other servers or desktops; I have verified that the NIC drivers are in the appropriate directory (since these can cause the system to freeze when starting Windows). If I leave the system alone, it can sit at the "Setup is starting Windows" screen for over an hour - no error message appears.

If anyone has run into something similar or knows how to get around this error, I would be interested... I know we can always do an assisted install but was hoping to get RIS working for this hardware environment.

Please let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you!

Liz

[Richard Sandy]

Liz:

Here's a link to the BIOS revision history for the DL 380G4. P51 is the reference for the DL 380G4 BIOS code, but not the actual revision number. The latest revision of the P51/DL380G4 BIOS is 10/10/2005. Check out during the POST routine of the server and check the actual BIOS date to make sure that it is 10/10/2005. If not, then it should be updated. Here's the link and I hope that this helps.
http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/revision/8696.html

Wayne

[Liz Rollet]

Hi Wayne! I double-checked - we are running the P51 BIOS dated 10/10/2005.

Any other ideas?

[Richard Sandy]

The only other thing that I can think of is to go into the RBSU(F9 prompt) and make sure that the IRQ setting for the 6i controller is different than the IRQ setting of the NICs. Most likely the NICs and probably the 6i controller are set at IRQ 5. If that is the case, try setting the 6i controller to IRQ 7 and see if that resolves the problem.

thanks,

Wayne

[Liz Rollet]

I checked - all of the IRQs are set to 5 (huh?). We are actually using a 6402 PCI card for the drive controller not the onboard 6i one. I already set the 6402 as the boot controller in the BIOS, thinking that might have been the problem.

I will go ahead and change the IRQ for the NICs and see what happens. Is this a default HP configuration? Or something that only happens on a DL380 G4?

Please let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you for your help with this!

Liz

[Liz Rollet]

Okay, this is odd... I can change the IRQ to 7 for the 6i card, no problem... but if I change the IRQ for the 6402 controller (located in PCI slot 1), the IRQ for the first embedded NIC changes as well. The second embedded NIC stays at IRQ5.

Again, I am not familiar with HPs... is this normal? I am going to give RIS another try with the 6402 set to IRQ7, just to see what happens...

[Liz Rollet]

I just tried to re-RIS... same problem, no errors on the RIS server. This is with the 6402 controller and first onboard NIC having their IRQs set to 7.

I'm going to try and change the PXE NIC from the first one to the second one (which has an IRQ of 5 and can be set separately from the controller) and see if that takes care of the problem... At that point, the 6402 controller would have an IRQ of 7 and the NIC would have an IRQ of 5...

[Richard Sandy]

Are both the SA 6i controller and the 6402 controller both at 2.58 firmware? Also, what is your drive configuration and is it in the DL 380G4 or in an external unit? If you haven't already, verify that the driver for the storage controller is at 5.68.0.32. Here's a link just in case you need it: http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/22970.html

[Liz Rollet]

Hi! The firware for both smart arrays is 2.58. The 6402 is an internal card connected to the internal hard drives. The drivers I am loading via RIS are the 5.68.0.32 ones; I downloaded the .exe from HPs site, extracted the files and placed them in the $OEM$ directories (the one at the same level as \i386 and the one under \i386). I also modified the .sif file to reflect the change in $OEM$ driver path and the different NIC being used.

I know with the Intel NICs you have to copy the drivers to the i386 directory in order for them to be picked up by RIS; I did the same with the HP NIC drivers. Should the array drivers go there as well?

Sorry I'm being such a pain about this; I'm planning on giving up and just using the assisted install for now if I can't get it working by tomorrow.

Thanks again for all your help!

[Liz Rollet]

Found it - hopefully this will help other people! I mentioned to my colleague who deals with RIS'ing our desktops and he said that he had to edit the .inf driver file for any Broadcom drivers in order for RIS to work. Seems that the .inf file contains information for NT, 2000, XP and 2003 drivers... and RIS doesn't like the older driver information to be first. Once I removed those offending lines, RIS worked perfectly.

Please let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you!