Raid drivers not on Floppy but CD or USB?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

hello, since I have no floppy drive for my server installation, can I load the WD3200 driver on any other device than the floppy?

My win2003 is not reconizing the HDD on startup during installation process.

Thanks

2

If there is a setting for legacy USB support in BIOS, enable it. Add your driver files to the root directory of a USB flash drive. Hopefully your BIOS will detect your flash drive as a floppy drive, in which case Windows should see it as drive A:. Make sure your optical drive precedes it in the boot order.

I haven’t tried the above method, so it may not work, or it may need some refinement.

BTW, you need preinstallation drivers for your SATA controller, not your drive.

3

Thanks very much, I had to make a floppy for this motherboard.

now, the HDD WD2500 is my main boot device, win2003 will start the boot and then shutdown again and again, I tried to reinstall but the HDD is not recognized by the setup, but all other additional drives are present. Any Idea on what to do here?

Thanks

4

I would first confirm whether the drive is OK by running a bootable hardware diagnostic such as WD’s Data LifeGuard. Alternatively, add your drive to a working system and run a Windows based diagnostic and surface scan such as HD Sentinel or HDDScan.

If all checks out OK, then you could reconfigure your SATA controller in your BIOS setup for IDE compatibilty mode. This will result in Windows using its native IDE driver rather than a SATA or RAID/AHCI driver. If Windows then installs and runs OK, you will have narrowed down your problem to a driver issue.

You could also test your drive in a USB enclosure. In this case Windows will be using its native USB mass storage driver.

5

Have you done some of the more simple things like bios updates?  How old is the system, and what size drive were you originally using for your system drive?  Server 2003 is rather old.  You would want to eliminate the possibility of drive size limitation in the bios.  Which usually only shows up with the system drive.  Any other secondary drives may be larger, but are being passed off to Windows for management, so the BIOS may not stop boot up if it doesn’t recognize them.