Poweredge 2300 Perc2 (AMI) and Win2k not booting from RAID 2

[geoffrob]

Situation:
S/H PE 2300 with 6 x 9gb config as 5 x Raid5 and hot spare.
Mainboard, ESM and Backplane latest firmware upgrades.
Perc Firmware updated to U.84 (Standalone)
Problem existed prior to the firmware upgrades.
Mission:
Trying to install Win2k Server.
Boots off CD ok, installs on RAID using AMI35xx native driver, (even if I tell it to use the Dell supplied driver from the web site). Reboot at end of first part of setup.
Get this at the point it should boot from the RAID to continue the Windows portion of setup.
"Error reading from disk
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot"
In short, it installs but then won't boot from the RAID.
Rerunning 2k install shows the partition correctly on the drive formatted with NTFS, all as it should be. I get the feeling the partition is not being marked active for some stupid reason, but not sure how to prove it.
Any ideas? I have no disks with the system, I've got the manuals from the Web site, and the firmware and drivers etc and I have installed several dell boxes like this with Novell 4.11 with no major dramas, but 2k seems confused.
Any suggestions? Someone mentioned 'dell hidden partitions' obliquely, but I had to create and config the raid when the system arrived so I doubt there is anything still there. I'll format each drive and redo the lot from scratch if anyone knows that will fix it.
No support contract, and the the dell 'tech support' bot doesnt seem to know about this issue.

 

[johnv20]

Hi,
there is a number of things you could try -

1: After the system does its first reboot insert a dos diskette and run fdisk to check that the primary partition is marked active

2: Try using the open CD supplied by Dell with the system to install the OS. This should take care of any fdisk issues

 

[ChuckCraig]

You have to hit the F6 key after the initial blue screen (goes black, blue, black) to stop the SCSI autodetect. Load the RAID driver, then the embedded SCSI driver. What is happening is that the kernel is seeing the embedded card as the boot card, (SCSI controler 0) and then when the boot.ini tries to find the bootsector it is looking for it on the wrong controler. If you manually load the drivers in the right order SCSI controler 0 will be the raid card.

 

[galileo3000]

ChuckCraig is right, the F6 key is needed in order to load the appropriate driver. Otherwise W2K will default to its own version of a compatible driver.

 

[cathalbergin]

change the scan sequence in the 2300 bios if this does not help, ensure you only have one logical drive to begin with..regds, Dell

 

[geoffrob]

Thanks to all who responded. The F6 trick was working but the driver seems to have the same name as the one that ships with 2k, which made me think it wasn't.
The real problem was that the PERC2 apparently doesn't support boot partitions >12GB. I happened to see this little gem on the Dell site in a forum message, I can't seem to find it documented anywhere else. Had I been installing NT4 or Netware I wouldn't have had the problem as both OS require a small boot partition. Since the RAID5 was 34Gb it would install from the CD to the RAID just fine, but the controller can't cope with that kind of boot partition size and refuses to boot from it. I assume this is a firmware thing. Cured by reconfiging the raid into a 9Gb Raid 1 and a 24Gb Raid 5, which lost the hot spare but thems the breaks.
Ran through the process again and installed 2k on the 9gb Raid 1 logical drive and 2k came up and is now installed and working happily.

Thanks again to all that responded