Every turn is a brick wall

[bluestrobe]

There are a couple threads floating around about my situations going with these servers. They are Intel SR1200 1U servers with Promise FastTrak100 RAID controllers. I am trying to at least get Windows 2003 Server on them. Promise doesn't have drivers for anything past XP and their reply to my help request was "buy a newer RAID card". This is impossible since the chip set is soldered right on the server motherboard. I tried using the 2000 and XP drivers with no progress. I tried deleting any RAID array and installing 2003 with the hopes of getting into the OS and doing a RAID1 from there. No matter what I try 2003 setup will refuse to see any hard drives in the system, array or no array. The server BIOS only gives you the option of disabling the RAID card in the boot sequence. There is no option to by-pass the card and just boot up seeing the hard drives themselves.

So I have accepted that i will probably never use these servers unless I use 2000 or XP for a web server OS which isn't feasible. Linux isn't an option at this time as I am pressed for time and don't want to learn it right now. So other than scrapping these servers, what are my options? Is there a magical driver that will let 2003 see the driver past the raid card so I can get setup to install the OS on one of the drives?

 

[MichaelD]

1. Have you tried the XP drivers? Sometimes "NT is NT"
2. W2K3 has a lot of drivers built in to the OS. If you can get the OS to load with the XP drivers, the OS should replace them w/the right ones

 

[bluestrobe]

XP drivers do not work. I thought the "NT is NT' thing would fly too.

 

[MichaelD]

Check this page.

Check out the ESG-SHV Backplane Driver. It's only 10KB...looks like a load-off-the-floppy driver to me. Or maybe you could slipstream it?

*edit*

Or how about the Fastrack 100 Family Windows driver (last one at the bottom) ON THIS PAGE.

 

[bluestrobe]

It's the same driver file as you download from the drivers section. It contains drivers for nt, 98se/me, 2000, and XP. When I tried the XP drivers, I used the generic "fasttrak" driver and also the "fasttrak100".

I checked out the Intel page you linked to. I haven't seen it before and it looks like some of the updates are for the hot swap SCSI board. I might research the update package a bit and run it to see if that helps with the driver detection at all. The back pane driver was for when you are already in win2k3 server.

 

[bluestrobe]

I went through each driver with and without the array set with no luck. The update package is for the server version with the SCSI drives, mine has the IDE drives. I booted up on a Linux Live CD and it saw the drives just fine as did the install of Ubuntu Server. Is there a generic or "magic" Promise driver out there that I can use just to get Win2K3 server on at least one of the drives? If I can get it installed and booted on one drive, I can work from there.