We had a server crash we were working on recovering yesterday.

We booted up both environments, loading the Intel on board RAID controller drivers and could not get access to the drives attached to the controller.

We ended up managing to get the server to boot and run SP IT from within the OS.

Server configuration:

• Intel SE7221BA P4 Server Board
• Intel P4 3.0GHz HT
• 2GB RAM
• 2 x 200GB Seagate SATA in RAID 1
• Intel SC5295E chassis

Any input on why we were not able to get anywhere?

We have another SE7221BA based system coming back to us in an upcoming upgrade. We will test further with that box.

Philip

Check out this link for a driver that may work as F6 floppy with legacy or directly in Vista recovery environment. You have to extract the .EXE using "Universal Extractor" or something to grab the driver files. The thing is, you ain't got no real RAID there. Intel at one point put out ICH5R south bridge chips that can do RAID using some sort of Adaptec or LSI addon BIOS and a special driver. Different vendors adopted it for their own entry server products and got their own PCI device IDs so no one driver would work for another (compatible) system. Support for this type of "CrapRAID" was soon dropped by Intel. Even today Intel has not been able to produce throughout stable RAID onboard solutions, just recently shown by my collegue with his RAID5 setup. All this is what drove us away from Intel, many many moons ago.

Please give exact board model number 'SE7221BA1-E' next time, it saves alot of work to lookup possible solutions for you. Thank you.
Good luck. 

Thanks for that.

Philip

Hey Philip, did those drivers (link from bsdice) work for you? I'd just like to know in case anyone else runs into this.

Nate,

We haven't finished a migration on an identical unit yet. Once we do, I will definitely test them.

Thanks,

Philip

Okay, cool, thanks Philip. 

Nate,

I am stumped yet again ... and again on an Intel board: S3000AH (not LX) with two RAID 1 arrays (4 drives) configured on it.

I have an identical box sitting beside this one that is getting the new SBS install. SBS took the driver disk with no issues.

When I use the IT Edition recovery to do a HIR, load the drivers I get nothing. If I do not load the drivers I see all 4 drives.

I checked into the various drivers available for the ICH7r as per the previous post and nothing seems to change.

Am I missing something here ... or is there a problem with the on board Intel RAID controllers?

Thanks,

Philip

I'm not sure, off the top of my head.  We'll have to test this in our lab with a similar marchine (thanks for providing the details there).  One think you can try is to use the Legacy environment with the F6 pre-boot storage miniport load option and load the Server 2003 ICH7r storage miniport driver from diskette.  Or did you already do this?  If so, then try instead the Recommended environment and after it boots use the Tools | Load Drivers option to load the same drivers (this time load drivers meant for Vista).

Nate,

I tried every way I could think of in the Legacy environment, including all types of RAID drivers and more via F6. When I did not load any drivers, all I saw were 4 individual drives. The BIOS version on the S3000AH is 44. The most current is 46, so the next step will be to update the BIOS and try again.

I thought maybe the previous OS setup on the arrays may have been causing the problem, so I fried the arrays, RAID 0 across all 4 drives, initialized and formatted, then set them back to RAID 1 for each pair again. That did not work.

I did not use a Vista/W2K08 driver in the WinPE environment. That one did not dawn on me. I will give it a shot.

I guess the big puzzle is why? With the new SBS box right beside it picking up the driver disk with no issues, it really boggles my mind that the recovery environment doesn't.

BTW, after running a restore to disk 1 of the RAID 1 pair, and disk 3 of the other RAID 1 pair, I received a blinking cursor. So, I went into the OS' Recovery Console and could see that there was indeed a C: with Windows data on it.

So, I will try again.

Thanks,

Philip

I have run into situations in the past where the miniport floppy (F6 floppy) works at Windows installation time using F6, but does not work with F6 during a WinPE boot.  However, so far I have not experienced such an issue with any of Intel's miniport driver packages.  In one such case we were able to determine the cause of the problem (some incorrect syntax in the txtsetup.oem  file, IIRC) and to resolve it by editing the file, but in another situation we were unsuccessful even after repairing the .INF file.

We're making some changes to the recovery environment build in the near future (oh, wait, the guy who's doing it is going to be out of the country for two weeks, so he won't get to it until he gets back, at which time it'll be another two weeks likely before we have a new ISO), so I'll plan on having something that may resolve your issue within a month (sorry I can't have it sooner).  In the mean time we'll see if one of our lab machines is similar enough to your S3000AH that we can do some testing ourselves to see if we can resolve this issue for you a bit earlier.

Nate,

The Windows Vista driver did indeed work in the WinPE environment.

There were some funky behaviours though: If I had the USB FDD attached, then Disk 0 on the RAID controller was identified as the floppy disk.

Remove the FDD, refresh the volumes and all was good. We had both RAID 1 arrays available for restore.

We ran the HIR for all 4 volumes in the image and rebooted.

We were greeted with a blinking cursor. Indeed, a heart dropping moment.

But, we rebooted into the OS Recovery Console and ran a fixmbr and fixboot and rebooted.

We now have a relatively happy SBS restore on a new box. Hardware reconfig needs to happen to get things mellowed out, but I think we can handle that.

Thanks for all of your help.

Philip

Awesome!  And thanks for sharing all of the details.  This is the first time I've heard of issues with USB FDDs, so I'll watch out for that in the future.