Windows 2008 on HP ProLiant DL380 G3 hangs after loading crcdisk.sys

Couple of days back I decided to upgrade my ProLiant DL380 G3 (about 3 or 4 years old) server to Windows 2oo8 from Windows 2003.

First issue was this server did not have a DVD drive, so I copied the bits to the local data disk and started the install. The install went fine without any issues. My next mega issue was, when the server restarted after the install it just hung while loading Windows. Next, I tried to restart it in safe mode. This showed me that it froze after loading crcdisk.sys.

Googling for information led me to a HP support forum which said that Windows 2008 server is not supported on DL380 G3 models. On the same thread someone had mentioned that the latest SmartStart tool allows you to install Windows 2008 server on DL380 G3 models.

My next stop was HP's support site to download the software. I select my server model and for the operating system I selected Windows Server 2003 and downloaded HP SmartStart CD x32 version 8.25. Used the CD made from the downloaded ISO image to restart the server.

Using SmartStart I was able to select Windows 2008 as the operating system and it also allowed me to install it from a USB drive directly using the ISO image. After a few minutes the server was up and running. There is no option to upgrade using SmartStart, so I ended up deleting the system partition and recreating it again. Which means all your data is lost, lucky me I had my data in a separate partition.

How to Enumerate the Shared Service Providers using SharePoint Object Model.

SharePoint Object Model does not expose the SharedResourceProviders collection as a public property. It is a non-public member of the ServerFarm object.

This said, we can still access the SharedResourceProviders property using the magic of "reflection". Below is the code to enumerate the Shared service propviders.

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Reflection;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration;
using Microsoft.Office.Server;

namespace Velavan.EnumSSPs
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
EnumSharedServiceProviders();
}

private static void EnumSharedServiceProviders()
{
//Get the default server context
ServerContext sc = ServerContext.Default;

//Use reflection to get the m_ServerFarm Property
object serverFarm = sc.GetType().GetField("m_ServerFarm", BindingFlags.Instance BindingFlags.NonPublic).GetValue(sc);

//Use reflection to get the ShareResourceProviders collection
object sharedResourceProviders = serverFarm.GetType().GetProperty("SharedResourceProviders").GetValue(serverFarm, null);

//Enumerate all Shared Service providers
foreach (object sharedResourceProvider in sharedResourceProviders as IEnumerable)
{
Console.WriteLine("SSP - " +
sharedResourceProvider.GetType().GetProperty("Name").GetValue(sharedResourceProvider, null) as string);
}
}
}
}


make sure you add the references to
Microsoft.Office.Server.dll and
Microsoft.SharePoint.dll