DL165 G7 - DVD support with Windows 2008

[Stephen Jepson]

I have two customers with DL165 G7s with the B110i SATA raid. Both have installed WIndows 2008 R2 using the advisory to load drivers via USB. Both sites now cannot use the SATA DVD drive within Windows.

Any ideas?

Steve J

[Michael A. McKenney]

You can still use the DVD. iLO can work with the USB thumb drive to load drives just like a DVD. It is faster to copy them to a thumb drive than burn a DVD.

I have even built a bootable USB to install the Windows 2008 OS from. It loads faster than a DVD.

[Stephen Jepson]

Michael

Thanks I know the work around but I would like to fix the problem. I can't keep selling servers with DVDs that don't work.

Steve

[Michael A. McKenney]

You sell servers with DVDs that don't work. Are they HP DVDs. Do you install 2008 or 2008 R2? In the device manager does the controller for the DVD show up? Is the controller and DVD enabled in the CMOS? Did you try upgrading the controller drivers? Did you install the firmware for the server board to see if it resolves the issue.

[Stephen Griot]

I'm having the same situation here. I have 4 2T Drives setup in a Raid 1+0 using the on board B100i smart array. With The DVD installed first in SATA socket 5. I noticed that the Raid initialization takes about 40 seconds to complete. After the system boots to Windows it dosen't reconize the DVD drive at all. I then tried the SATA 6 socket it still takes 40 seconds for the Raid to initialize. But on Bootup to Windows it will
see the DVD drive but the Drive goes away after a couple of minutes. Then when I remove
the DVD Connection all together the Raid initialization take less than 10sec to complete.

[Stephen Jepson]

Stephen

I don't think there is a fix, only a work around by not using the B110i in RAID configuration and using mirroring on the O/S.

We have stopped quoting this server as a result of this issue.

Steve J