12 August 2009 12:57 tonyrogerson

Installing Windows 2008 x64 on DELL PowerEdge 2970 - no drivers / devices found

This has just drove me mad for half an hour; I've just took delivery of a new machine I'm building for my client - 2 x 146GB SAS in RAID 1 and 4 x 300GB SAS in RAID 10 - going through the DELL install I eventually get to the Windows 2008 x64 Server install and the bit where it asks which partition to install on - empty - no devices found and you can proceed.

I went into the PERC controller and removed all but 1 of the disk groups (where I'm putting the OS) and its worked fine.

I guess I needed to install the OS first then set up the other virtual disk group; bizzarre - perhaps never tested by DELL as it came like that (2 disk groups).

Whatcha!

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# Interesting Finds: August 13, 2009

13 August 2009 12:13 by Jason Haley

Interesting Finds: August 13, 2009

# re: Installing Windows 2008 x64 on DELL PowerEdge 2970 - no drivers / devices found

14 August 2009 12:55 by GrumpyOldDBA

This seems to be a windows 2008 "feature" the best thing to do is put all your storage drivers on a usb stick and add them part way through the install. This drove me nuts when building a server at home until I found a blog post about the same problem with vista. I have a post to put up about this.

# re: Installing Windows 2008 x64 on DELL PowerEdge 2970 - no drivers / devices found

15 August 2009 07:37 by tonyrogerson

That didn't work - I found the PERC 5 driver throught he browser and it just wouldn't see the partition.

The only way was to drop the 2nd logical disk group.

Another odd thing I'll blog about seperately is that I was doing perf tests on the C: and noticed that the write speed was a poor 30MBytes per second - turns out that Write Back cache was to blame - setting to Write Through doubled the write performance for what I was doing (restoring a database with a 8GB log on the C:) - very strange given that Write Back is suppose to be the one that signals "I've written" on it saving to cache and Write Through is suppose to be the one that signals "I've written" when it hits the disk - bizzarre.