Hi.

Ok, this is driving me nuts. We have here a dual Xeon server box, with a Supermicro X6DA8-G2 motherboard, etc. It has two onboard Ultra320 SCSI channels, provided by an Adaptec AIC-7902 controller, and channel A is connected to a pair of 76GB Seagate Barracuda 10Krpm drives. It also has a pair of 500GB Sata drives.

The two scsi drives are currently set up as a striped raid array for maximum speed. I know for a fact all this works, as originally it was running 2000 on one of the sata drives, and using the scsi array for data.

We want to reinstall the thing with XP, and get it booting from the SCSI drives. However, I can't even get the damn thing to recognise the scsi drives during XP setup. I have downloaded the drivers from Supermicro's website, and tried them. I have download a number of drivers for what purports to be the correct device from Adaptec's website and tried them. I have googled for other drivers, and tried THEM. None of them do anyting useful at all.

Setup simply says it can't find any drives and quits, unless I have the sata drives connected, in which case it finds them which is not what I want.

Does anyone have any ideas? I've been fiddling with the thing for hours, as have a couple of others with substantial windows experience, and we're all stumped.

pca

A trick from Server 2000 that I remember is to start hitting F6 to load drivers the second the blue setup screen appears, and don't wait till later. This did something different on that OS, and might have carried into XP.

Yeah. When you say you downloaded drivers, did you get a driver set that created a floppy disk specifically for xp setup ?

I just had to to through this procedure myself. It absolutely will not work without a floppy disk and the F6 trick during setup. In my case that also involved a Usb floppy drive.

Yes, this is all with drivers on floppy, loaded via F6 during setup. The drivers are found, loaded, and then apparently do absolutely nothing. It's very annoying

pca

Try disabling the SATA controller as a test?

Yes, I have an idea, but you're not going to like it, because it's horrendously complicated and hard to get right. Create a Windows PE (or BartPE) boot CD containing the correct SCSI drivers. Boot from that, confirming that you can see the SCSI device OK. Then do an unattended install from the hard disk. You'll need to copy the Windows XP CD to the disk, slipstream any drivers/service packs/hotfixes into the image (or you can put them in a separate directory and set up unattend.inf to pick them up).

It's horrendous. It's quite slick once you get it working, but it's usually overkill for a single PC (you'd generally capture the image and then use something like ADS/WDS/Ghost or a disk duplicator to slap it down onto multiple PCs).

Alternatively, you could try booting from an SP2 slipstreamed image. Maybe that'll be more reliable, or even have the drivers in it.

Ooh, I've had another idea. The SCSI controller's not on the other side of a PCI-PCI bridge that you don't have drivers for during setup? Sometimes manufacturers do this because they've run out of PCI devices on the included southbridge. Not sure how to get around that one.