Today I was reminded (again) why using the default controller drivers when doing an SBS setup is a Bad Thing. I was rebuilding a server for a client who needed to install an updated RAID controller card. I got the drivers off the CD that came with the controller and copied them to a floppy disk. I booted the server from the installation CD, pressed F6 to tell setup that I had drivers to load, and selected the proper card drivers from the floppy. As setup continued and started copying files to disk, I got an error that it couldn’t copy a particular file. It was a catalog file for the controller driver, and it was apparently not on the floppy. Well, not to be deterred, I restarted setup, pressed F6 again, but this time when it prompted me about the drivers and let me know that the drivers I had on floppy were newer than what setup had on CD, I opted to let setup use the drivers on CD and continue.
Continue it did. Setup got all the way through both the text mode and GUI portions of install and rebooted the system to load the OS for the first time. Then everything went south. I got the Windows 2003 spash screen for about 2 seconds, and the server rebooted. I’ve seen this behavior before (and I’ll document it in a later post or possibly use it as script material for an IT Horror flick) so I knew it was a problem with the controller driver. I went to the manufacturer web site, downloaded the latest driver disk set and used that for a repair install of the server. The repair install completed successfully, and the server booted normally after that.
Out of curiousity, I compared the driver files on CD to the driver files I downloaded from the web site. They were the same, save for one file - the catalog file that setup complained about being unable to copy.
Just goes to show, again, that you should really grab the latest drivers from the controller manufacturer web site before building a server, espcially if you’re working with a “white box” server. I’ve learned my lession. Again…