Windows Server 2003 Install Raid Driver Without Floppy
Installing Windows XP With F6 AHCI/RAID Drivers From DVD Without Floppy Drive Windows XP requires that drivers for AHCI/RAID disk controllers must be supplied on floppy disk (activated by F6 key during installation). However today there are many computers with USB ports and CD/DVD drive, but without floppy drive. This article explains how to use USB thumbdrive instead of F6 floppy disk with AHCI/RAID drivers for Windows XP installation to the AHCI/RAID disk. Contents. 1. Formulation of the problem You need to install Windows XP or Windows 2003 Server onto PC or server without floppy drive.
SATA controller is in AHCI/RAID mode, so you need to use F6 floppy disk supplied by hardware vendor. Server has USB ports and DVD drive.
The Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 installation disc will not recognize your LSI perc raid card without installing third party drivers. This becomes complicated as there is no floppy drive with the power edge 2950 and just sticking the drivers on a usb stick won't cut it. Luckily I figured out how to get windows. Re: ML110 G3 - load RAID driver without floppy. Remove the USB drive key from your notebook/desktop, and insert it into a USB port in your ML110 G3 server, and then turn the server on. Immediately insert the Windows Server 2003 CD into your CD drive. Enter the server's BIOS by hitting F10 during POST. Go to Advanced - USB Configuration.
For some reason, you don't want to, and you want to install from original, unmodified installation disc. Solution in a nutshell Computer will boot from FlashBoot-created USB thumbdrive and then switch boot process to CD. Windows Setup in the early Text Mode phase will access drive A: via redirected BIOS Interrupt 13h and read F6 Floppy Driver files from the image file on USB thumbdrive. There's a freeware utility to transfer boot control from floppy to CD drive, for a long time used with Emergency Boot Kit on old BIOSes which didn't support booting from CD.
This time it serves different purpose: being converted to bootable USB thumbdrive with FlashBoot, it transfers boot control from USB thumbdrive to CD drive with original Windows installation disc. The difference between this boot path and normal booting from CD is that, in the former case, drive A: is mapped to the image file on the USB thumbdrive. We use to inject F6 Floppy Driver files into the image file of floppy-to-CD boot switcher before passing it to FlashBoot for conversion. Prerequisites (things to prepare in advance). USB thumbdrive.
F6 Floppy Driver files (.sys,.inf,.cat,.oem) for SATA/RAID controller from hardware vendor. Installed.
Windows XP / 2003 Server installation disc. (it includes Boot CD Loader v2.0a1, Bart BFI and helper batch file). Step by step guide a) Prepare image of floppy-to-CD boot switcher with integrated F6 Floppy Driver files for SATA/RAID controller. Create new folder C: createfloppyimage and extract contents of createfloppyimage.zip into it. Copy F6 Floppy Driver files from your hardware vendor (.inf,.sys,.cat,.oem) into C: createfloppyimage f6floppy.
Run C: createfloppyimage createfloppyimage.cmd and make sure there are no error messages. If everything is OK, new file mergedfloppy.img will be created in C: createfloppyimage.
If there is a smartstart CD for that server boot the Server with that and you should have the option select your OS, and Windows 2003 should be included there. The Smartstart CD then prepares the system and will eventually ask you to insert your OS CD. If you have lost the Smartstart CD you should be able to download the iso from the HP site.
With that CD you don't need any Floppies. If there is no such CD available for that particular server, and if it isn't an SBS Server version of 2003, you should be able to create a 2003 boot CD with the the driver integrated. Check the following site for more help with that: Or use the nliteos utility to do the same. Go to support.hp.com; search for downloads under your model and look for the latest smartstart CD.
If one does not exist, google 'slipstream' and this is a mechanism by which you make a custom Win2k3 installation CD (meaning you need a burner and lots of scratch space and time) with drivers pre-built. Personally, I learned long ago that you just have to bite the bullet and bring both a USB-attached floppy carrier and an IDE-based floppy drive when you travel. At least they fixed this nonsense in Windows 7.
Hardware Raid is the preferred way for Raid. It's as simple as that. Better performance, and you do not bother youre CPU with mirroring the drives.
You do not need a floppy disk perse. You can put the driver on a USB stick, or burn it to CD, however, since you allready will have the Win OS CD in youre drive, that can be a bit problematic;-) Make sure you have disabled booting from USB in your BIOS, then put the USB drive in the server before booting so the drive is available when the setup starts. Hope this helps. Hardware RAID is NOT the preferred way to do RAID. Everything is relative. On the high end, customers like google and some cloud providers are pure software-based RAID, but they handle petabytes.
NetApp, Oracle/Sun, and quite a fair number of NAS and SAN appliance vendors do it all with software RAID. In fact, software RAID will always have the ability to provide better performance then any hardware-assisted device. Some petabyte cloud suppliers are all using host-based software RAID. At the low-end, are you aware that even the native Windows based RAID1 does read load balancing? Whatever disk drive can process the data first does it. The low-end hardware RAID controllers don't have that feature. Can RAID controllers dynamically use your O/S RAM to cache I/Os as needed to improve performance and PREVENT I/Os from occurring?
Years ago software RAID had a performance penalty, but now with multiple cores the XOR work can be done in nanoseconds. One thing a hardware RAID controller can't do is prevent I/Os. Software based RAID stacks can and do gain overall performance by begin more frugal and not executing unnecessary I/Os. The host-based RAID knows more about what is happening now, and in the future then any stand-alone hardware controller possibly could. The software-based RAID can do calculations via DMA in nanoseconds while you have to wait milliseconds to access disks with a hardware controller. We write appliance software for many vendors, some use hardware-based controllers, others use custom or native RAID engines that layer above or within the kernel. As such I can't tell you about some well-known products that actually are little more then a few MB of code that sits on top of LINUX or Solaris.
There is absolutely no 'hardware' controller. Your examples here are, as you point out Unix based. I agree, that the software raid Unix, or for that matter Linux uses is way better then the software raid Microsoft puts in their products. Most of the Microsoft Software raid solutions I encountered, and that are quite a few, somewhere along the line get sychronisation errors, rebuilding of array's, not cleaning up their mess afterwards, resulting in a startup menu with one option to boot from the c: drive and more than 8 (really!) lines to boot from the secondary plex aka mirrored drive. We are talking an HP server here, not a 25 cents sata-raid controller you can find on budget boards for a simple home PC.
Windows Server 2003 Install Raid Driver Without Floppy Download
So I can go along with your view, however imho a distinct difference must be made between Unix/Linux softraid and the Windows derivate. On a HP Windows machine my choice will always be using the array controller onboard, or if you want a seperate smartarray controller.