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Server 2008 Woes Over

I installed a Server 2008 web server a few weeks ago, but ran into several issues, primarially dealing with the 3ware RAID card.

No matter what I would do, rebuilding the array would fail.  I even bought a new drive on the theory that one of the drives was bad.

Then I had a thought… what if the card needed new firmware?  I downloaded new firmware, and loaded them onto floppies…  Yes, the dreaded floppy.  I booted up in MS-DOS mode and tried to flash, but got the dreaded Cannot Read File: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

So I went back into Server to write the files back to floppy… and I copied them to all 4 floppy disks that I had.  After running the upgrade batch file, which took several minutes, the 3ware Escalade 8006 card was upgraded to the latest firmware.

After this, I still had to add the “bad” drive via the card’s BIOS, but then I didn’t have any problems.  It took many hours for the array to rebuild, but I saw this morning that the array’s status was “OK” rather than “degraded”. 

FINALLY!  Server 2008 is finally ready for production, and I’m gonna start throwing sites on it.

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1 comment

J. Anderson August 12, 2009 at 7:33 am

What firmware did you use? I'm having the exact same issues, but had already upgraded my firmware to the "latest" (2004 release).

I re-flashed with the latest firmware again, but same result. Any chance you found a newer "beta" firmware somewhere or something? Something newer than the 7.7.1 codeset available from 3ware?

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