Issue with WinPE 2.0, Diskpart.exe, and certain RAID cards
Posted
Wednesday, January 31, 2007 1:21 PM
by
jhuston
While using BDD 2007, which uses WinPE 2.0, I had a strange issue. BDD 2007 would call the DISKPART.EXE and FORMAT.COM commands to partition and format a RAID-1 volume and install an OS onto it. This seems to work fine until the OS (Windows 2003 in this case) reboots after the textmode portion of the setup.
After playing around with this, I discovered that there is some sort of weird interaction with DISKPART.EXE (version 6.0), Windows Server 2003, and the Dell PERC 5/i serial-attached-SCSI (SAS) RAID card on my Dell PowerEdge 2950.
The symptom was this. During the reboot after the textmode portion of the setup has completed, the computer would being the POST operation. When it got to the RAID card, it would initialize the card, not that there were 1 or more logical volumes, and then freeze. It is my belief that at the point it freezes, the system BIOS is attempting to enumerate the logical volume to see if it should add it to the boot order when POST is completed.
The only way to clear this was to reinitialize the drives (erasing all data). It was clear that *something* was being written to the drives in a weird way that caused the behavior.
I then tried various permutations (including running the bootsect.exe command) to get it to work. If I used WinPE 2005 (from BDD 2.5) to partition/format the disk and then used WinPE 2.0 (and BDD 2007) to perform the installation (with the partition/format command disabled), it would work just fine.
I then discovered that the FORMAT.COM command was not at fault, but it was the DISKPART.EXE utility that was causing my issue. BDD 2007 does not issue any unusual commands so I have to assume that it was the utility itself. To verify this, I ended up replacing the command with a third-party shareware utility (AEFDISK32) to repartition the volume. I was still calling WinPE 2.0's FORMAT.COM. Once this was in place, the system partitioned the disk, formatted it, and made its way past the point it was freezing before.
Not sure if this is a fix to come from Microsoft or Dell (either the system BIOS or the RAID firmware), but if you get stuck with some unusual behavior, give this a try.