Forum Discussion

OnsiteJim's avatar
OnsiteJim
Level 2
10 years ago

Frustrated with System Recovery Restore Anywhere!

I have a customer who due to an unfortunate placement of the server had their server plunge 6 feet onto a hard floor.

Surprisingly the OS drives survived but the Data raid did not, nor various other components.

I've ordered them in a replacement server & have now spent almost the entire day trying various System Recovery CD's & methods to get them up & running on their new hardware.

Their old server was a HP ML150G6 & their new server is a Lenovo ThinkServer TD340 with a Think Server Raid 500 Adapter II.

I've tried using the System Recovery 2011 & 2013 disc's & a wide range of options to restore the system.

My last attempt was to remove all the partitions & then first restore the System reserved partition with Active Boot, disk signature & MBR. Then without restarting I restored the OS Partition (C) without any extra options except for resize the partition. I even disabled the hidden checkmarks (Delete & prompt for drivers & the mini setup).

Almost every boot afterwards is the same, it boots to the Windows repair option & won't let me fix the problem.

I've been looking at this far too long & unforunately without data my customer is dead in the water & I've promised them I would be there in about 14 hours from now to install their new restored server. So any help you can provide would be really appreciated.

 

Thank you in advance

Backup and Recovery
Recovering
Restore
SSR 2013
System Recovery
Troubleshooting
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • OnsiteJim's avatar
    OnsiteJim
    10 years ago

    Thanks for nothing to Symantec on this severity 1 case.

    In the end I to fix it this is what we did:

    1. Restore System Reserve partition (Active Partition, Original Disk Signature + Restore anywhere with ONLY the Prompt for drivers option)

    2. Restored the OS drive with (Restore anywhere with ONLY Prompt for drivers)

    3. During the restores I manually fed the drivers for the RAID card, skipped the NIC drivers & SCSI\DISKVEN_LSIPROD9240-8i as well.

    4. Changed all the Bios options from auto to legacy.

    5. Successful boot. Added all missing drivers, restarted, restored data partition & final reboot.

     

    I would just like to put it out there, how displeased I was with the responsiveness of Symantec support on this one. It's now just after 4pm EST, & I was promised a callback from the second tier support at 8:30am, and although I've sent case updates & even left the assigned engineer a voicemail expressing how displeased I was that they had not responded, they still haven't picked up the phone.

     

    If this is how they treat customers with a Business critical support request I'm going to have to strongly consider changing backup software vendors for all of my customers.

    Thank you for your responses Dave & Chris

    Still frustrated but at least it's done, and now my customer will be back in business... finally...

  • Dave_H1's avatar
    Dave_H1
    Level 4
    10 years ago

    You want to restore the disk signature on the windows partition, not the system reserved.

  • OnsiteJim's avatar
    OnsiteJim
    Level 2
    10 years ago

    I've gone through god knows how many restores now, following the steps documented in that tech article, as well as I've started a case with Symantec that I've now been waiting on a return call for about 12 hours. I was on the phone with the initial case for a few hours last night but they moved me up to the next tier support & they are the ones that were supposed to call me back hours & hours ago.

    I've tried, restoring the system reserve partition first, & then the OS drive, I've tried just the C: & manually moving the boot files to the C: & rebuilding the BCD & MBR & using fixboot. I've tried the disk signature just on the OS partition a few times as well.

    The latest attempt is now blue screening after I told the restore to delete the old drivers & prompt for new drivers as we're dealing with a completely different raid card.

    But nothing seems to be working, & if the environment wasn't set up with Roaming profiles & redirected folders I would just say screw it & re-os from scratch. But that just won't work realistically.

    I just booted to the Windows recovery console, does anyone know of a way I can force feed the new raid drivers to the OS via the command prompt here or am I still looking at more restore attempts?

  • OnsiteJim's avatar
    OnsiteJim
    Level 2
    10 years ago

    Thanks for nothing to Symantec on this severity 1 case.

    In the end I to fix it this is what we did:

    1. Restore System Reserve partition (Active Partition, Original Disk Signature + Restore anywhere with ONLY the Prompt for drivers option)

    2. Restored the OS drive with (Restore anywhere with ONLY Prompt for drivers)

    3. During the restores I manually fed the drivers for the RAID card, skipped the NIC drivers & SCSI\DISKVEN_LSIPROD9240-8i as well.

    4. Changed all the Bios options from auto to legacy.

    5. Successful boot. Added all missing drivers, restarted, restored data partition & final reboot.

     

    I would just like to put it out there, how displeased I was with the responsiveness of Symantec support on this one. It's now just after 4pm EST, & I was promised a callback from the second tier support at 8:30am, and although I've sent case updates & even left the assigned engineer a voicemail expressing how displeased I was that they had not responded, they still haven't picked up the phone.

     

    If this is how they treat customers with a Business critical support request I'm going to have to strongly consider changing backup software vendors for all of my customers.

    Thank you for your responses Dave & Chris

    Still frustrated but at least it's done, and now my customer will be back in business... finally...