Boot from SAN Windows 2003 x64 Ent. Server Setup

Question

Hello,

I have a curios situation setting up boot from SAN with IBM HS21 Blades.
On a test machine where windows was installed on a local disk before I have successfully installed and configured a boot-from-SAN configuration.
Now i'm doing exactly the same with another HS21 Blade and now the windows setup cannot find any disk where to install the OS.
The test machine and now the affected machine where installed with the following procedure:

ALT-E Emulex Bios
Point-to-Point Topology
PLOGI retry 50ms
--> setup a single path to storage configure connectivity storage group
setup boot lun

Windows setup
F6
-> load emulex driver

win setup start

setup ip-address
join domain
reboot

install windows storport hotfix
install emulex app and driver

install powerpath

install naviagent

add all paths
rescan disks
restart naviagent

shutdown server

storagegroup--> server --> connectivity status --> reconnect

start server

_____________

with this procedure the test machine was running.
I think that maybe the local installation on the test machine changed something on the cards which is important for boot-from-san, but I don't know what this could be.

Does anybody have an idea?

Thanks in advance.

best regards
Manfred

Nobby1 · Accepted Answer

If you only have 1 path to the disk enabled have you checked that the LUN is being presented via the same Clariion SP that is enabled in the HBA BIOS?

dynamox · Answer

did somebody go into HBAnywhere and disabled HBA's BIOS ?

mpi2 · Answer

Thank you for your reponse.No, the server is brandnew (I have unpacked the server today....)best regardsManfred

mpi2 · Answer

Damn, you're right.I still could not believe that I ran into this stupid error....I spent most of the time to get lputil running on the server (DOS boot disks, cdroms, ...) instead of thinking about this simple things. Thank you Nobby.best regardsManfred

mpi2 · Answer

No...I'm going to disable the boot support for the local raid controller.I think I should consider some settings for the bladeserver itself....One difference to the bootfromsan installation from the test server is, that I have completely disabled the controller at the test server. At the new production server not.....Thanks for your post.best regardsManfred

dynamox · Answer

did it trespass on you ?

mpi2 · Answer

Okay, the gladness is gone again.After the windows setup completes the windows won't start...Now I did the windows setup twice but that didn't solved the problem.Any ideas?(maybe hopefully again a stupid mistake....)best regardsManfred

mpi2 · Answer

Now I've got it....Disable raid controller and THEN install windows.Otherwise you'll get the following error:'Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.'best regardsManfred

dynamox · Answer

good to know ..i had a similar issue while trying to install Solaris 10 (to be booted from SAN) on one of my HP blades. The install went fine, but when i rebooted it could not see the boot drive. It was giving me some crazy error message so i thought something was wrong with grub, but i bet the internal controller was the culprit.

CLARiiON

Boot from SAN Windows 2003 x64 Ent. Server Setup

Was this post helpful?