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RAID storage drivers for boot media?

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Hi.

In the process of setting up AB 12 for an SBS 2011 Standard server, and hoping someone can give me a sanity check on restoring from a boot disk.

The server in question is a Dell Poweredge 510 and it has a PERC 6/I RAID controller, and all of this server’s hard drives are connected to the PERC.

I want to create bootable media to allow me to do a bare-metal restore to this server if necessary. I have an on-premises installation, so I am planning to use the Boot Media Builder. I’m reviewing the docs for BMB, but I’m still not clear on something, which in a nutshell is this:  

Should I expect the Acronis boot media I create recognize and access the PERC and its storage, or will I need to manually add drivers for the PERC in order to accomplish this?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

Joe

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Hello Joseph,

Basically, we have two bootable media versions.

One based on Linux. This is our own Linux distrubution which we build and optimize to work with our product.  The other is a Windows PE media, which is a standard PE environemnt from Microsoft with our product as a plugin

We recommend using the Linux media by default since it is fully under our control, but this is not always possible for the simple reason that Linux drivers are not always available from the manufacturer.

If the PERC 6 is a true harware RAID, then it 100% will work in Linux and in our media.

If it requires a driver and this driver isn't compiled into our Acronis Linux kernel, you should create a WinPE media.

Please note that you can only add your drivers to the WinPE media and you should do so only if the Linux one doesn't work.

Thanks for the response, Igor.

A follow-up question please:

I'm assuming that if I wanted to do a Universal Restore, I'd need to do so with WinPE media in order to include the drivers necessary for the new hardware?

 

 

Hello Joseph,

No, Universal Restore is not related to this because it is a seperate set of drivers.

Basically, we have two sets:

- The ones being used by the OS on the bootable media

- The ones we will inject during Universal Restore

The drivers used by the Bootable OS itself cannot be modified by users in the Linux version because they have to be compiled. The drivers used by Universal Restore can always be modified regardless of the media type.

I have the same question, but for the Perc 700 series in multiple model Dell servers.  I need to insure that for disaster recovery, the boot CD/DVD will recognize the raid controller to be able to restore the system. Will this series of raid controllers be recognized by the Linux boot media (restore targets run Windows Server 2012R2.

David Lide