Windows 2012 showing formatted SAN disk as RAW Volumes

Good day All,

Welcome back!!!

Recently we build a new physical Gen 10 Server with Windows 2012 R2 and it was provisioned with couple of 2 TB of LUN's formatted as NTFS

As part of the build steps we completed all the Tools installation and as the Physical Server was a HP Server and our Firmware\Drivers Standard  is always N-1 we applied the March SPP.

Server was rebooted and handover to client for SQL Install.

When client started to install SQL he realized that couldn't access the LUN's and asked us to verify it.

So when we checked we saw couple of LUN's was showing RAW and couple was showing just fine as GPT NTFS formatted disk.

This became a puzzle and we reached out to SAN team and they confirmed that SAN LUN's are properly formatted and they don't see any issues.

At this point we thought may be there is some issue with the OS install so started to redo the OS intall and performed the whole 9 yard.

One thing we noticed is that OS was installed , wew verified LUN's it was all showing as NTFS and as soon as we ran March 2018 SPP and reboot few disk would change to RAW Luns.

We happy that we know that because we ran March SPP this is issue so we started to look into Setup logs what all components was installed.

In the logs saw a driver install for Storage fiber channel adapter so went ahead and reverted the drivers to Oct 2017 and issue got resolved and just to ensure this is the right driver .. we tried installing again the March one and same issue.

Now that we identified instead of keeping Oct driver we tried with June driver CP032880.exe and issue got resolved .

Hopefully this helps someone!!! until next one you all have good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Moving 14 TB Dynamic Disk from Windows 2003 to Windows 2012

Good day All,

Welcome back!!!


We had a scenario as part of phasing out Windows 2003 VM we wanted to build a new Windows 2012 Server. The only challenge was that this Windows 2003 had 14 TB of Dynamic disk ,

Couple of ideas was discussed

1. Get a new disk in GPT on Windows 2012 and move the 14 TB data using robocopy. Well looking at the data it looks scary on the integrity as the data was very critical.
2. Create a 14TB LUN on the Storage and move the data on the storage end, as multiple disk was provisioned from SAN, LUN to LUN copy was ruled out.
3. Restore the 14 GB LUN from Backup very time consuming and we didn't have long Window from business.


All the options looked very time consuming and integrity of so much data was challenge...

Finally this is what we did and i had no clue that this would have worked...

1. As this was a 2003 VM all the Volumes of the dynamic disk we moved to a big large datastore.
2.Made a note of the order the disk's for the VM
3. Built a new Windows 2012 VM
4. Detached the dynamic disk from Windows 2003 VM and attached to Windows 2012 VM in the same order
5. Powered on the Windows 2012

I have never did something like this before and my hope was only 50%..

Well to our surprise after booting up Windows 2012 recognized the disk as dynamic disk and all the 14 TB was intact ..

If anyone feels had a better idea please share it to me probably we can use it for any more of future migrations..

Hopefully this helps someone... until next one all Have a good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!