Proliant N40L/WHS 2011 problems setting up RAID

jaydee

Diamond Member
May 6, 2000
4,500
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I have an N40L that I’ve been running in IDE mode for the past 6 months and would like to set it up for RAID 1 mirroring. I have the 250GB drive that comes with the server as the OS drive (primary master), a WD Green 750GB drive (secondary master) that is temporarily holding my data and two Samsung F3 1 TB drives installed and ready on secondary master and secondary slave channels.

Last night I changed the BIOS setting from IDE to RAID, hit Ctrl-F on bootup, setup my RAID config and it was relatively straight-forward. From there though, I could not get into the OS, WHS 2011 would hang on bootup. After this I was able to repeatably bootup in IDE mode or AHCI, but not RAID.

It seemed to me that I needed a Windows driver for the RAID controller. I googled and found this website where someone with the problem was able to get it to work by installing an older driver first, then a newer driver. http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/23231-hp-n40l-installation-notes-raidready-hdd/

He said the key is in the device manager to see a “storage controller” from which you can update the driver on. I followed his steps and was unable to get the “storage controller” to show up in my device manager. I tried to add a legacy device “storage controller” and pointed it to the AMD WHQL RAID v3.2.1540.75, but WHS wouldn’t take anything in the folder as a valid driver for a storage controller.

Thanks for any suggestions!
 

jaydee

Diamond Member
May 6, 2000
4,500
4
81
When I go to the HP drivers page my product, I can only select drivers for the following OS's (http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/psi/swdHome/?lang=en&cc=us&sp4ts.oid=4310887:

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Foundation Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Small Business
Microsoft Windows Server 2012
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server (x86)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server (x86-64)

Would any of the Windows based drivers work for WHS 2011, or am I just out of luck?
 

It's Not Lupus

Senior member
Aug 19, 2012
838
3
81
The OSs listed are the only ones HP officially supports for the N40L. I would try the Server 2008 R2 drivers since that's what WHS 2011 is based on.