DL140G3 upgrade onboard LSI Controller to e200i

[ThomasR_1]

Installed DL140G3 with W2k3 using onboard LSI/SATA hotplugs. Applied e200i (without disks), installed e200i drivers, imaged disk away, unplugged disk from LSI, connected to e200i, restored image, fixed boot record and MBR, but still unable to boot W2k3, message "error loading operating system".
When starting system with Recovery Console, I'm able to access the disk and it does look perfect; checked hpcisss2.sys (boot) and disabled lsi_sas.sys.
What else can be wrong?

[Cyberswim]

I had similar situation. Possible solutions:

1. Chose reinstall during install process (W2k3 actually preserves lot of data). Since you have a image, you can experiment this way.
2. Fresh install W2k3 with e200i installed. (not sure why you didn't try this in the first place)
3. If this would have been Linux we can easily update the initrd and boot with e200i

[Joshua Small_2]

You may well find some reghack to make this work, but ultimately what is wrong is that this is not a procedure that's meant to work.

Windows stores data relating to its C: and its storage in the registry, and you can't just "install a driver" for another card and then expect it to boot.

What you can do is..

1. Use ntbackup to backup server (NOT an image application).
2. Perform fresh installation of Windows and apply latest service pack
3. Restore ntbackup

Why this works is ntbackup System State restore does a registry "merge" instead of overwrite. This will leave the correct mass storage keys in place.