Issues With Symantec Recovery Disk

[mthrall]

Hi,

I'm having serious problems with the symantec recovery disk.  We are using Symantec System Recovery R2 Management Solution.  PRevious to the R2 upgrade restores were tested using the downloaded recovery disk and everything worked fine now however I cant seem to get a test restore working.

I'm trying to a test restore on a Dell Poweredge 2850 which is running Server 2008 R2.  I've created so many recovery disks I'm going insane.  The first issue I experienced was that the 64bit recovery disk would not boot this server after testing this disk on other servers I logged a call with Symantec who got me to test the disk on a PC and it worked...

So I tried the 32bit disk and it boots properly andf I am able to get to the recovery utility.  So now the main issue I am experiencing is that when I try to do the restore the target drive is always coming us as Invalid.

At first I assumed thta this was because I had created the recovery disk on our management solution server which is a VM so the disk didnt contain the relevant drivers for the server so I went to the server and tried to edit the ISO, but because the server is running a 64 bit OS I cant edit the 32bit recovery disk ISO... I tried editing the 64bit ISO, but that still wont boot.

So next I installed a full version of Symantec system recovery on a Windows 8.1 PC with a different license meaning I didnt have to create the recover disk through the management solution.  Once again only the 32bit disk would boot the server and once again the target drive location comes up as invalid when I try to do the restore.

This time I ran the driver validation tool on the server and it came back as all drivers installed, but I still cant do a restore.  I still cant edit the iso because its a 64 bit server and 32bit ISO.  I've tried adding in the perc 4 raid driver once in the restore environment and that doesnt work.

So now I'm stuck, I cant work out if the problem is driver related, or because the server is built using MBR, but the restore file location is saved on a volume that is GPT.

[mthrall]

Its a Dell Perc 4 d/c potentially made by LSI logic.  From what I can work out this card isnt supported in 2012R2 at all.  It can be made to work in 2012, but not R2 and nobody can work out why so I suspect that is why were are seeing this issue?

Can you confirm that?

Im pretty close to scrapping this test now and moving onto a Poweredge 2950 which has a Perc 5 card so Im hoping that will be smoother, but the more serious issue we have at the moment is we cant get the recovery disk to see the network interface on our Gen 8 HP blade servers plugged into a HP C7000  flex fabric chassis.

Do you want me to raise that issue in a new post?

[criley]

That sounds about right to me. The recovery environment needs a compatible driver (so one that works with 2012 R2/8.1) to get the relevant hardware working. If that does not exist, I don't think there is much we can do here.

Yes, please start a new post for the issue with the network card. Thanks.