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BSOD after Dell Raid controller upgrade

HI,

I have a Dell PE server which has a H200 raid controller in it with 2 x 600GB SAS drives in raid 1.

I have struggled with disk performance and after doing a lot of reading found that i would get some performance improvements from upgrading to a better raid card.

I ordered a Dell H700 card and attempted the upgrade tonight.

The instructions were as follows:

Power down server.
Plug in new raid controller into server in a spare pcie slot leaving the H200 in place with drives attached.
When into windows (SBS2011) load the latest driver for the H700.
Power down server.
Take out H200 and put in place the H700 and attached drives.
Boot server and go into raid controller.
Import foreign config.
Save and reboot.

Now to this point everything went well.

When the server tries to boot into windows it gets to the splash screen with the horizontal bar and then blue screens.

I have now gone back to the H200 but the raid has been wiped out so im now running without raid.

Any ideas on what i did wrong or how to resolve the BSOD?

thanks

Frosty555

Have a look at this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Usually the problem is that although you've installed the drivers, they aren't active at boot-time. Windows disables any unused storage controller drivers to improve boot times, but this means if the storage controller changes out from underneath Windows, it will bluescreen on boot because it can't access the storage.

It's the same problem you would experience if you changed the SATA mode in the BIOS from IDE to AHCI on a regular desktop.

The fix is to enable the necessary driver in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services, as described in the article above.

If you've already swapped controllers and you can't easily go back, you can make the registry change from an offline environment by booting into a recovery CD, running RegEdit from the recovery environment and mount the C:\Windows\System32\Config\SYSTEM registry hive from SBS2011.

Or you can do it from within SBS2011 while it is running on the old controller.

timb551

ASKER

Thats great, thanks!!!

I will give that a go on monday night

timb551

ASKER

Im in the registry now. How do i know which the relevant driver is?

timb551

ASKER

Ah, i think its percsas2 and i guess i change start from 0 to 1.

timb551

ASKER

Do I need to find the driver for the out going card and change it to 0 or can you have two with start as 1

Frosty555

You can set start=1 for multiple drivers, I don't think it hurts anything.

timb551

ASKER

Should the registry be 3 or 1. Found my current card and it was set to 3 so set the new one to the same and still get bsod with inaccessible boot device

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timb551

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timb551

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Issue cannot be resolved