I can be such a dumbass sometimes.
If you read my previous post, you know that I’m trying to install Server 2008 on a spare server. Well, I’ve had quite a fiasco that I haven’t experienced in a long time….
I created several boot DVDs, but I couldn’t get the server to read any of them. I even went into the existing OS to see if the drive could read them. I burned several new copies on different media, but nothing. I went into Device Manager to see if the drive had any problems, but all seemed fine. I even completely changed out ATA cables.
I even tried pulled an ATA DVD drive from another computer (which wasn’t particularly easy, because this case is crap). It didn’t work either. I pulled a Plextor SATA DVD drive (one of the first, from 2005, and it is very picky about which chipsets it works with).
Thankfully, my server motherboard found the SATA drive, and I was able to boot. I came to a problem with my 3ware RAID controller, however. The 3ware 7000 escalade is a very popular RAID controller in the server world, so you THINK Microsoft would have included drivers, but nooooooooooooo….
While hunting down drivers, I came to a realization. I remember that some chipsets drive PATA devices from the SATA chipset. I went back into the BIOS, and sure enough, the SATA chipset was set to “SATA only”. I changed this to SATA + PATA (combined mode, compatibility mode, etc.) and my old slimline DVD drive worked like a charm! It even read ALL of the previous media that I had burned before.
Now that it was running, I could tackle the RAID controller issue. Looking on 3ware’s site, I see that they have limted support for Server 2008, but it works if you use their latest “engineering sample” drivers.
I was thinking that I’d have to put these on a floppy disk…. which would be a completely new fiasco… I’d have to boot into the old OS, copy the files from a USB drive, create an MS-DOS disk, load the drivers, etc….
But thankfully installing 3rd party drivers on Server 2008 is much, much easier. When I got to the “no drives were found to install on” message, there is a handy little “browse” button, that sees all drives currently attached… including my USB flash drive! I pointed Windows to this driver, and it installed, and then I was able to partition and format my RAID 1 array.
Hallelujah!
So I’m happily installing Server 2008. Sometimes I can be such a dumbass.
