2003 Reboot Hang

[kmccubbin]

Hi. I'm testing Veeam backup at the moment and have run into an issue. When I reboot the 2003 Server that holds the Veeam product and the VCB proxy, the reboot hangs, just as Windows 2003 is starting, indefinitely until someone goes and physically unplugs the fiber from our QLogic HBAs at which point the reboot continues as normal. Then the HBAs can be plugged back in and the product functions generally pretty well.
Now I'm aware that this KB pretty accurately describes the issue... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927065 , but it offers no solution other than "Let Windows Write a Disk Signiture to the LUNs" which seems like a very very bad idea on production VMware LUNs.
I couldn't find anything on this forum and so I'm assuming that either I'm doing something very wrong or I'm missing a really obvious solution.
Any thoughts?

Kelly McCubbin
County of Marin

[Gostev]

Kelly, I believe that the resolution for this is disabling drive automount in Windows.

[kmccubbin]

Thanks for that, but I did do that as part of the install instructions. I also checked earlier this morning to verify that the registry key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MountMgr\NoAutoMount , was set to 1 which indicates no automount.

[Gostev]

Oh, I see. From the support KB article you provided it sounds like this issue only applies to SP1 but not SP2. May be it worths trying to upgrade your server as the next step? Or are you already running the latest SP?

[kmccubbin]

I'm sorry, i should've included that information initially. Yes, I'm running SP2 and have been since before the install of VCB or Veeam Backup.

[kmccubbin]

So I'm the only guy in the world with this problem?
I've rebuilt the machine from scratch. i didn't even plug in the fiber until after running diskpart automount disable and automount scrub.
As soon as I plugged the fiber in, I was stuck again.

[Gostev]

I can confirm that we have never received similar reports... I did some googling today and I did not find anything related either... could it be HBA-specific problem? May be updating drivers would help?