topic Re: Windows Server 2012 RTM - Not recognizing SAS/SATA Controller Drives - BL465 in BladeSystem - General

Windows Server 2012 RTM - Not recognizing SAS/SATA Controller Drives - BL465

Michael Barbere — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:19:42 GMT

I am attempting to install Windows Server 2012 RTM for evaluation purposes on one of our obsolete (out of support) blade enclosures. This is a BL465c G1 Blade that exceeds hardware requirements for the install.

The problem. I start the install but the installation does not detect any drives. The same thing happened in Server 2008 versions so I was aware that I would have to load in the drivers manually. I had an older version of Smart Start, so I attempted to use that. I could not locate any suitable drivers on SmartStart. I downloaded the latest HP ProLiant Smart Array SAS/SATA Controller Driver for Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition. This is version 6.24.0.64 (4 Jun 2012) cp015741.exe.

The driver loads and the installation detects the Smart Array E200I Controller from the hpcissx2.inf file. It goes through the process of loading the driver but is still unable to detect any disks (see screenshots).

Does anyone have any recommendations or am I SOL until HP actually releases drivers that are more compatible with the new version of Windows Server.

Thanks in advance,

Michael Barbere

Re: Windows Server 2012 RTM - Not recognizing SAS/SATA Controller Drives - BL465

Matti_Kurkela — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:14:19 GMT

This is a characteristic of true hardware RAID controllers: before the RAID controller is configured, you cannot see any physical disks on the controller at all.

You should reboot the blade, watch the boot messages and press F8 when you see the "Press F8 to configure SmartArray" prompt. Then you should use the SmartArray configuration menus to create a single logical disk out of the physical disk(s) installed on the blade.

Newer SmartArray controllers will automatically set up a RAID1 configuration at first boot if they are not overridden and the disks have not been used before; but in your case, the existing configuration may have been wiped, so the controller detects that the disks don't have any valid configuration but they have been used before by some SmartArray controller. In this situation, you may have to explicitly configure the RAID controller: after all, it does not know whether you're recycling an old server for a new purpose, or trying to recover life-or-death critical data from some disks rescued from a server room fire using another non-damaged server...

Re: Windows Server 2012 RTM - Not recognizing SAS/SATA Controller Drives - BL465

Michael Barbere — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:07:10 GMT

Thanks Matti:

I forgot that we zeroed out these drives when the server was decommissioned. Creating the Logical Drive beforehand worked. Disk shows up during the install now.

Re: Windows Server 2012 RTM - Not recognizing SAS/SATA Controller Drives - BL465

Chorus-Mark — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:00:25 GMT

Hi,

Just in case someone else stumbles on this as we did, we had this same problem (drive configured in P410i but Windows Server 2012 would not see it).

The solution that worked for us was to run a 'HP System Erase' command..

We then reset the date/time, boot controller order, configured a RAID1 drive and a logical, then Windows Server 2012 saw the drive fine and installed.

Hope that helps!

Mark.

Re: Windows Server 2012 RTM - Not recognizing SAS/SATA Controller Drives - BL465

Schinkel — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 07:29:32 GMT

We have several proliant g6 servers (ml330/350 and dl80) with p410i controllers. We tried multiple different logical drives on them (configured with ORCA) but windows server 2012 wont see them during install, not even after providing the updated driver from the MSSuplement2012 package. What could be wrong?

Re: Windows Server 2012 RTM - Not recognizing SAS/SATA Controller Drives - BL465

yayati — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:44:41 GMT

I have the exact same problem. Even Windows 7 and windows home server 2011 are recognizing my HDD but not server 2012

I have HP Proliant N40L and trying to install server 2011 with 2 3TB hard drives on RAID1

Somebody please help..