One of my tasks for the day was to install Windows Server 2003 on a machine that we will be using to run our office phone system.. During my initial attempt at installing the OS I got a message saying that no hard disks were found.. Ok, so I thought "Ahh, setup must need drivers for the PCI SATA card... Not a problem.." So I get on another machine, download the drivers and put them on a USB flash drive... I reboot the machine, go in to Windows setup, press F6 (to install 3rd party RAID or SCSI drivers) and I'm presented with this wonderful message... Isn't it ironic that I was trying to use a piece of newer hardware and yet it required the use of hardware that I haven't used in probably atleast the last 7 years... To make a long story short, I wound up having to go out and purchase a box of 3.5" floppy disks because there were none to be found anywhere around the office or at my house... Even after putting the drivers on the floppy disk and setting up Windows 2003 Setup to use them I still received the message saying no hard disks can be found.. The system BIOS doesn't even list SATA drives so there's the problem, but the hardware is all the original configuration from the factory (eMachines) and the BIOS for the SATA card does load and detect the drive during startup... I'm not sure where to go from here but, hopefully google will help..-Jack
Update: I found a utility called nLite that seems to possibly be the answer to my problem. I will have to test it tomorrow but basically nLite allows you to build a custom Windows installation package and add drivers, remove default windows components..etc.. It can be found here.
2 comments:
If it is a large vendor brand server, then the vendor probably provides a pre-install environment CD.
For example, with Dell PowerEdge servers, you boot the Dell "Boot me first" cd, then it calls the installer routines and prompts you to insert the OS cds.
That would've been nice... Turns out that I was using the wrong drivers.. I learned a lesson.. Always just go to the vendor's site to download the drivers.. I usually use google because it's easier than navigating through most vendor's sites, but this time it didn't work out..
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