Oh yeah. Last time I did installation of Windows Server was years ago and I completely forgot the headache one normally get in the process, but these days I had to do an installation for one particular case, so here we go.
The hardware for installation is a tower server with LSI MegaRaid controller installed in PCI, hosting two drives in mirror. Additionally there is an IBM LTO tape drive. Server needs to do some specific backup of some specific windows stuff, so no chance to have it running Linux. First decision (not mine anyway) was to install Win Srv 2008.
Booting the server, configuring RAID, running Win 2008 install. All looks fine but at some moment I get a warning that while installation can be done on my drives, it won’t be able to boot from them afterwards. It sounded weird to me, so I just ignored the warning and went on with the setup. HDDs were formatted, files copied and Windows setup went into reboot as normal, but it really failed to boot from the drives… Ok, few manipulations here and there with BIOS, RAID Controller and Windows Setup partitioning part and I manage to install Win 2008 and boot it up.
First thing I see is some kind of welcome control panel, that offers to do different things in order to finish configuration of the server. While it looks nice and fancy – it is really hard to find something you are looking for there, but OK, you get used to it. Missing some drivers and updates – all installed in few hours and then what I see: LTO drive is not recognized, non of the drivers help. We spend quite some time tweaking and tricking all possible aspects of the system and no luck to see the drive. After some reading here and there we found out that Win 2008 changed something in the way they treat tape drives and so on, so we decided to downgrade to Win 2003 instead, as it is not critical on which version of Windows will run, but we need drive to work.
So next thing is Windows 2003 Server CD goes into USB CD-ROM for installation. Booting up setup and it turns out that this version of Windows has no driver for LSI RAID controller where we have our HDDs connected and setup can not continue unless I supply drivers ON A FLOPPY DISK :-( Minutes later I had what Windows asked for and I told the setup to go and get the drivers from the floppy. It read the floppy, told me that it found drivers for my controller, but then it informed me there is no such hardware in my computer 0_o
Tried different drivers from the CD supplied along with the hardware including the ones for Win 2003 32bit, Win 2003 64bit, Win 2000 and whatever else I could find. Tried updated versions of driver from the vendors web site, same shit. While booted to Linux live CD I could see all the hardware properly working as well confirmed that drivers used for Windows setup are correct (according to the info in .sys file and lspci output).
Finally, we decided to make a custom Windows CD with nLite and put drivers in, and it worked! We used same Windows CD for OS sources, same drivers that we used on floppy and so on. How come? This is out of my understanding…
As I am in the process of finalizing Windows 2003 install now, I hope that tape drive will work, though I will have no wonder if something else will fail.
P.S.: I had no intentions to say that Windows is terribly bad, especially compared to something else, in this article. I just wanted to point out some difficulties I had in this particular case.