lh4+symbios netraid controller

[CA938600]

Hello,
I have successfully moved a Windows nt4 image from an older hp e45 netserver to an lh4 netserver using a third party image tool from ultrabac (SADR).

The boot and os partitions are on the same logical drive (C), and other data is on another logical drive (D).

When I try to boot the lh4, boot.ini is found on the symbios drives, but when I select the os to boot, the lh4 does the bsod with an "inaccessible boot device" error message.

The lh4 has two hw raided 18 gig scsi disks on the lh4 default integrated scsi symbios controller.

The older hp netserver e45 had scsi drives on an adaptec 2940 controller.

I think the problem is an incorrect scsi driver in /winnt/system32, since the original e45 used adaptec scsi controllers, and the lh4 is using a symbios controller. But I do not know how to change it.

I tried adding an idential adaptec 2940 scsi controller and hd with the same nt image and boot.ini to the lh4. The same problem occurred.

TIA,
jh

[Dave Unverhau_1 · Accepted solution]

John,

My NT experience is getting a bit dated (and my memory of this stuff is starting to fade, but maybe some of what I recall will help...

I remember that, when installing NT onto a netserver, I had to be mindful of which controller was going to interface to the boot/root drive. This controller needed to be the first one that NT loaded the driver for at install time. The best explanation that I can come up with is that NT must have a special pointer to the driver of the boot disk. If I was installing onto a disk connected to a Netraid or Mylex DAC and if I loaded the onboard SCSI driver before the Netraid or Mylex driver, it would always BSOD at boot time. If I reinstalled and did nothing more than change the order of driver loading, so that I loaded the Netraid or Mylex driver first, it worked fine. I spoke with a Microsoft engineer at the time and he confirmed that this was their experience, as well.

The bottom line is, unless you know how to hack the NT kernel (this is beyond me), you'll probably need to reinstall NT and load the correct driver for the boot interface first.

I hope this helps!

Regards,

Dave

[kris rombauts]

Hi John,

since you say the disks are in a raid configuration, this means the embedded Netraid controller in the LH4 is activated and as such the driver needed to boot from is the Netraid driver.

I think you can fix your bootproblem by doing the follwing :

- install a Adaptec card in the LH4
- connect the disk cage in the LH4 to this
aha2940 controller
- make sure this aha2940 is the boot
controller (check F2 setup for boot order)
- system should boot normally
- add the driver for the embedded Netraid
controller and shut down server
- remove aha2940 and move cable back to
original connctor on systemboard
- reboot

this might do the trick

HTH,

Kris

[Alicia White]

I am not sure that adding the Adaptec controller as Kris suggested would really work. I think it might cause more problems.

I think it would be much easier to simply add the driver for the LH4's integrated NetRAID controller to the e45. Then, create a new image of the e45's drives which you can then use on the LH4.

The reason I think Kris's suggestion may not work is that if you boot one of the two 18GB drives using the adaptec controller, then add the driver for the LH4 integrated NetRAID to the boot drive. The two mirrored drives will NOT be identical when you put them back on the NetRAID controller. Since the drives will not be identical, you could get data corruption as a result.

If you do want to try the other suggestion, the way around this problem is to manually fail the 2nd hard drive and then remove it from the drive cage before you connect the drive cage to the adaptec controller (fail a drive by going to Objects > Physical Drive).

Then, when you boot to the adaptec controller, you will get an error that the logical drive has failed (because both drives are no longer connected to the NetRAID controller). Add the NetRAID driver to the remaining 18GB hard drive and reboot to make sure the drive is still bootable.

Once you have done that. Shut down the system and reconnect the drive to the onboard NetRAID controller. When you boot up, you will probably get the error about the failed logical drive. Go into NetRAID express tools and manually force the 18GB drive online (you can do this by going to Objects > Physical Drive).

Reboot to make sure you can get into NT now using the one drive. Assuming you can, then reboot and go back into NetRAID Express Tools. Reinsert the second 18gb drive and then start a rebuild.

So, you see, I think it would be much easier to add the LH4 NetRAID driver to the e45 and then reimage it for use on the LH4.

Alicia

[kris rombauts]

I agree with Alicia that adding the driver for the Netraid on the E45 first would be the best course of action, i was not sure if this was still an option so did not listed it.

However the fact both disks which are now on the Netraid controller as raid 1 would not be in sync would not really be an issue since my assumption would be that one would start allover again anyhow by booting from one disk (once the Netraid driver is added) from the Netraid and then migrate from raid0 to raid1 i.e. to get to the final config you wanted.

Or in case the driver has been added on the e45 then the LH4 raid1 config can just stay unchanged of course when the image is restored onto the disks.

The fact you write raid configuraton to a disk or disks does not affect the data on those disks since that specific raid info is written in a reserved area on the disks which hold no customer data. Taking it out of a raid and using it on a aha2940 i.e. just works fine since the non raid controller (like aha2940) does not look at that area on the disk.
I did this several times between raid and non raid controllers (Netraid and Symbios i.e.) and it works fine.

The only error message you will have in your case is that the Netraid will complain their are missing disk(s) if this route is ever tried.
Go for the addition of the driver on the e45 and create a new image that should do it.

HTH

Kris

[CA938600]

Thank you to all for the help.

I have tried the answer kris gave, to no avail, and tried the other answers in various forms over the past year (believe it or not.

Ultimately I am just going to reinstall the OS on the LH4 and be done. It will take 5 times longer to restup the years worth of software on the e45 on win2k, but should still be less time consuming than already the time spent on this effort.

Thanks again for the help,
JH