Win2k on a LH3

[Eric Wheeler]

My business has a HP LH3 Netserver that is not letting me install Win2k on anything bigger than a 800 MB partition. I would like to find out why this is and what I have to do to correct it.

[Chris Blumenshine]

What size is your hard drive? What controller is it on? What partions are already on it? What is the method of your installation? Need a lot more details.

[Eric Wheeler]

It has a HP NetRaid controller card and six 4.2 Gig SCSI hard drives on the controller. I'm trying to do a fresh install of Win2k Server with clean slated drives, and it keeps coming up with the error message that the main partition has to be under one gig in size.

[David J. Arthurs]

I've been working with Eric on this LH3. It actually has 4 18 gig drives in it, with a intagrated HP Net Raid card and two other raid cards. We've upgraded the bios and the firmware on the controller card in response to microsoft's knowlegebase article Q216645

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q216645

This is a fresh install, we are loading the Netraid windows 2000 driver pressing F6 during installation. But it'll only let us load it on a 800 meg partition, it wouldn't work with a 900 meg partition. Is my only option to replace the netraid controller to install 2000 on a good size partition or has anyone ran into this before and has the magical answer?

[Theo Hill_1]

Have you reconfigured the arrays? Has a low level format been performed on the drives? Try booting up to a dos based boot diskette and create a partition of larger than 800MB. Are you installing straight from the CD? Try creating the floppy diskettes for win2k if so.

[Chris Blumenshine]

Sometimes when windows will not allow you to create a partition greater than 1gb, it's because it does not understand the geometry of the logical drive given by the netraid card. To work around this, you may be able to create a partition with FDISK and then start the installation again.

Are the hdd's that you're installing to on the integrated netraid? If they are, remove the other netraid cards. They are not necessary to install win2k. Also, for the integrated controller, win2k cd will have a good driver. There is no need to press F6 to install a 3rd party driver.

[Eric Wheeler]

I reconfigured the array to use raid 0 and now the install and windows 2000 see the array correctly. I don't know why it wouldn't work before. When I had 2000 running on 800 megs, it saw all four drives so I'm not sure how the array was configured before when we ran NT 4 on it, but I left it the way it was this whole time. It's possible that it was set up for raid 1 and win2k didn't see that correctly for some reason, but I don't know. Anyway thanks for your segestions. I now have win2k running with a 3.5 gig partition, although I would like to make it bigger, I think I'll leave it alone.......thanks

David J. Arthurs