Imaging Saga Continues
So when last we visited our hero, oops wrong story :>)
This past weekend I had another project involving imaging and I found another big gotcha to watchout for. I was using ShadowProtect, but I have a feeling it is not vendor specific. I had forgotten that I wanted to write it up on here until I got a note from Mark Berry thanking me for the original article on Shadow Protect.
This happened to be a larger SBS System and had two different RAID Controller Cards installed in it. One talked to the RAID-5 Array that held the OS and the working files and the other talked to an External High-Rely 7 Bay HotSwap Rack.
Over time the drives in the system array had been swapped out for larger drives and we now had a full set of 300Gb drives in place of the original 120Gb drives. Since this was an older card and didn’t support growing the arrays naively, I decided the easiest course of action would be to take an image of the partitions, blow away the array, recreate it and lay the image back down into larger partitions.
Well being a belt and suspenders kind of guy, I wanted a fallback position or two, so I got there the day before and pulled a new live image with Shadow Protect, then let the back run that night and came in, in the morning verified the backup and did a cold image booting from the SP IT Version CD. At this point I was pretty confident I was covered so I blew away the array. I created the new array, watched my life tick by as it built parity and then created my partitions and did the restore. Image my surprise when instead of booting it came back and said no boot device found. This was the same hardware, nothing removed or added, it should have just worked.
Ok I thought maybe a problem with the MBR, I will just restore the C drive again and this time take the choice to put down a new MBR. No joy, same error. Ok don’t panic grab that Windows Server R2 install disk boot to the repair console and run fixmbr. Well you guessed it, still no boot device found.
Ok so here is the rub, when you delete the partitions the BIOS on the server board adjusts itself to look at the other RAID Controller as the boot device, needless to say they are all backup drives and none has a MBR, so it just comes back and reports no boot device.
So if you see this message after you do a restore from an image, check your boot order in the bios, even if you only have one RAID Controller, it may just move them around on you.
Hope this saves you some of the stress I went through this weekend.
October 31st, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Wow, that’s an interesting observation. I had no idea that some BIOSes (what is the plural for BIOS anyway?) would dynamically reshuffle disk order without consulting you. Simultaneously amazing and annoying! :)
October 31st, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Either did I until last weekend, yet another example of how trying to over simplify technology actually makes it harder to deal with.
For the record it was an Intel Server Board that would not keep it’s settings, but I suspect they will all do it.