BartPE - adding drivers

This is a question more to do with BartPE than Acronis TI at the moment. We recently replaced a failed server that had an Adaptec RAID card that Acronis recovery CD was able to access, the drives that is. The new server is a Proliant ML350 G5 that uses a Smart Array e200i SAS controller, which Acronis does not see, as such we have no way of doing a recovery of the OS.

I am in the process of seeing of the ATI BartPE plugin would do what is needed, but obviously we need to add in the SAe200i drivers, which is where I am having problems. When loading BartPE I get the error that "hpcisss2.sys" can not be found. I looked in "hpcissx2.inf" and "txtsetup.oem" and verified the files are correct.

Previously the error was "File HpCISSs2.sys not found, even though the actual file was named hpcisss2.sys. I assumed that the difference in capitalization was causing the conflict. I have gone through the following files and edited all files to represent the correct file naming convention without any success. Now that all references and file names match exactly I still get the error that "hpcisss2.sys" is missing. So then what exactly do I need to do to get the SAS controller added to the PE. Without these Acronis will not see the SAS drives, hence no recovery.

I do not have this issue when adding the drivers for the network interface, but then again the INF references q57w2k.sys of which the file name matches in terms of capitalization.

 

Try changing the file name to ALL CAPS (HPCISSS2.SYS). You don't need to edit the inf and txtsetup.oem files to match. Just edit the driver file name in pebuilder\BartPE\I386\System32\Drivers and reburn the CD.

I use Cyrano's Postprocessing plugin and elect the Filecase option. This changes all files in the Drivers folder to all caps. This avoids this type of error.

 

Changing to all caps had the same effect. One thing that did occur to me, could this be that the driver is found and that the error message is incorrect? I am testing this out on my laptop using VMWare. Obviously I do not have a Smart Array e200i installed. But I would not figure this be that drastic of an issue that PE will not load. The NIC drivers are loaded just fine, or so it seems. I can not believe that "missing" hardware such as this would cause PE to fail as such.

If this is not the case, then there has to be something wrong with the HP drivers. If I edit the inf file and change all to lowercase, I will get the error message with the file name in lowercase, and vice versa. I even edited the name to 1.sys with the filename 1.sys and got the error "1.sys could not be found. It is almost as if the problem is the ini file is directing the location of the file to be elsewhere.

Here is the intro to the inf file
[version]
Signature="$WINDOWS NT$"
Class=SCSIAdapter
ClassGUID={4D36E97B-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Provider=%HP%
CatalogFile.ntx86=HpCISSs2.cat
DriverVer=01/09/2007,6.4.0.32

[SourceDisksNames.x86]
1=%DISK%,HpCISSs2.sys,,

[SourceDisksFiles.x86]
HpCISSs2.sys=1,,

[DestinationDirs]
DefaultDestDir = 12 ; DIRID_DRIVERS

 

What does the file name look like in your output BartPE folder? Does it show as all caps? If it is in I386\System32\Drivers and is all caps, I can't help you. If it's not all caps, it need to be.

 

Well I took a wild guess that the error message was incorrect so I used a Windows 2003 server as the source, and it worked. Originally I had used Win XP pro as I was originally told that these drivers would be the ones to work with XP. So while the error message was stating the file could not be found, in fact it was an issue of XP Pro just not able to load the file. Why the error message has to say the file can not be found is beyond me.