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Frustrated with System Recovery Restore Anywhere!

OnsiteJim
Level 2

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

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

OnsiteJim
Level 2

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...

View solution in original post

4 REPLIES 4

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

Restore steps are documented here: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH129112

If you are still having problems after following this, I would suggest opening a support case.

Dave_H1
Level 4

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

OnsiteJim
Level 2

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
Level 2

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...