SmartScripting Toolkit filecopy freezing on DL380G3

[Reade Bricker]

Everything works fine on this system until the OEM drivers filecopy or the OS filecopy. Using the COMPAQ supplied utility.

The system hangs in random places during the filecopy.

The system is responsive (to ctrl-alt-del) and the hard drives are racing, but the copy stops.

I've left it overnight, so I know it really is frozen.

I've upgraded the system firmware, the DOS nic driver, the 5i controller firmware, no change.

I've seen this before, but could usually get it to work by restarting the install, this time no luck.

The one thing that has changed is my distribution server is now using a 1Gb/sec NIC.

Maybe a buffering issue????

BTW: Just tried the floppy on an old DL580, got the same problem.

[M Kasprowicz]

Two issues I saw with this, the first is setting on the NIC card, you can search the HP knowledge base for this one. The other was not including SMARTDRV.SYS on the DOS diskette. Smartdrv is absolutely required for building Windows 2003 server.

[Reade Bricker]

Looks like FILECOPY dies when it encounters network congestion or timeouts.

I found out that the distribution server has been doing a very large copy over a wan link.

I rewrote my install to let WINNT.EXE do the copy and it timed out several times, but allowed me to retry. After doing several systems this way and using several different network switches, I started a Network Monitor trace on the distribution server and discovered the copy job.

I'll wait til it's done before trying any more builds.

Thanks All....

[Doug Koenig]

If this is installing W2K3 and it is dying on the file copy phase, this is documented on the microsoft web site as either the version of smartdrv is missing or you are not loading smartdrv. WINNT.exe is trying to flush buffers between different phases of copies and is not getting a response back.

[Joe Doyle]

I also ran into this problem. It is a buffering issue. I fixed it by loading smartdrv.exe before the copy.