Dumb Win7/Server 2008 bug - BIOS settings

I was trying to get a new frankenstein server up and running - boot would be a 320GB SATA drive off an ICH9R chipset, pretty standard stuff. The OS I wanted to install was Server 2008 R2 x64. I kept getting 'setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition' errors at the disk stage of things, even when using the advanced tools to delete/create new partitions. I even tried another SATA disk.

The solution?

Some googling turned up this: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproinstall/thread/8c2c1ac9-dc18-40af-a2b1-88dfaf9c2e70

The part of that thread that worked was BIOS settings. I am not joking. I had set the BIOS settings to only boot from the CD-ROM, nothing else. Changing the BIOS settings to have the 320GB disk as primary boot with the CD-ROM as secondary gave no issues at the disk portion of the installation.

Retarded, and made extra frustrating by the long waits caused (presumably) by the LSI SAS RAID card doing scans. Argh. I hope this helps one of you get by this problem faster than I did!

Comments

  1. Jason WrayMay 9, 2012 at 11:02 AM

    Just thought you would like to know that this was my issue and yes you helped me out, as I dealt with this issue for about 30 minutes before finding your blog. So thankful I stumbled upon this.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Chris TrotterMay 9, 2012 at 12:35 PM

      Glad that helped. Totally forgot about this issue since I posted.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning through failure - a keyboard creation journey

Image
tl;dr Built a custom keyboard cuz I have weirdo nerve pain issues.   Learned a lot cuz I failed a lot.   Maybe 'do it right the first time' is a bad frame of mind.   The keyboard ended up being kinda nifty.   It has lights, and a trackball, and QMK, and it helps my issues.   \o/ ( tl;dr is internet lingo that means, too long; didn't read ) Pain as a key ingredient An old proverb says, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and that is how this story begins. Over the last few years, age or stress or something has caught up with me and I developed the need to change my human-to-computer interface.  Mousing changed to trackballing.  The traditional keyboard was swapped out for an ergonomic, and then split keyboard.  Complicated multi-finger-and-hand key combinations were replaced by single keypress macros.  And yet more was still needed. It's often said that change only happens with pain - indeed, the organizations many of us work in seem to apply this as law - an
Read more

Learning Opportunities - Watching/listening list

Over the last year I've spent a lot of time learning (thank you, long commute & lunch hours).  Many topics ranging from Chef to DevOps to architecture concepts to management concepts and everything in between.  Why have I done this? DevOps Demystified with Ben Rockwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY DevOps at ancestry.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF5ya0q53kk Those two presentations were key in sending me down this road.  First, and most important, was Mr. Rockwood's explanation as to the real 'why', and the point behind DevOps from an operational perspective.  Second, and no less important but for a different reason, the continuous delivery system at ancestry.com really made it real to me because they are a 'Windows shop'.  So much of what I'd been reading about Chef/config mgmt. relied on amazing tools (see the error there?) only available to the Linux world.  Suddenly here's this guy telling me that it's possible on
Read more

DFSR - eventid 4312 - replication just won't work

This warning isn't documented that well on the googles, so here's some google fodder: You are trying to set up replication for a DFS folder (no existing replication) Source server is 2008R2, 'branch office' server is 2012R2 (I'm moving all our infra to 2012R2) You have no issues getting replication configured You see the DFSR folders get created on the other end, but nothing stages Finally you get EventID 4312: The DFS Replication service failed to get folder information when walking the file system on a journal wrap or loss recovery due to repeated sharing violations encountered on a folder. The service cannot replicate the folder and files in that folder until the sharing violation is resolved.    Additional Information:  Folder: F:\Users$\user.name\Desktop\Random Folder Name\  Replicated Folder Root: F:\Users$  File ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}-v0  Replicated Folder Name: Users  Replicated Folder ID: 33F0449D-5E67-4DA1-99A
Read more