ML110 G7 W2k12R2 installation crash

[EricG1793]

Hello,

I have an ML110 G7 with (2) 7.2k SATA drives in RAID1 using the B110i RAID controller. When installing Server 2012 Datacenter R2, it does not recognize the RAID array when asking where to install, so I load the driver from a flash drive. Windows recognizes the driver, but as soon as I click Next upon selecting  it, Windows says "Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart" and restarts after a second.

Both drives are in perfect condition according to S.M.A.R.T. (0 bad sectors). The Windows installer is running off an 8GB flash drive created with the Windows 7 USB Media Creation Tool if that makes a difference. I was able to successfully install Windows to one of the drives using legacy SATA instead of RAID, so I don't think that's the issue. One strange thing I notice is that the array is configured as RAID 1 + 0 (the only option other than RAID 0) even though there are only 2 drives in the array; I assume it simply knows to make it RAID 1, but maybe it's an issue. The BIOS is on the 7/1/2013 release. Are there any other settings in the BIOS or RAID controller that I should check?

Thanks in advance for any advice,

- Eric

[Sbrown · Accepted solution]

You probably aren't loading the proper driver! B110i is just intel ICH raid, so if it supports this software based raid, it should just work.

You may wish to partition and format the drives in DOS before attempting to install windows 2012 R2 - perhaps some old data present is causing the installer to fail?

drivers for B110i:

http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/swd/public/readIndex?sp4ts.oid=3958194&swLangOid=8&swEnvOid=4138

why not use the SPP smart start installer or IP:

When HP launched Gen8 they added a new functionality to iLO called Intelligent Provisioning (IP). which is a replacement to the old SmartStart CD. IP contains setup wizards and drivers to make deploying a new OS on a Gen8 server about 3x faster than the traditional method. One of the shortcuts is that IP already contains the necessary drivers for most common, supported OSs. IP is updated every few months with Service Pack for Proliant (SPP) to contain the latest and greatest drivers and OS compatibility, but server 2012 R2 was launched between two service pack update releases, meaning that IP version 1.5 does not have the correct drivers or scripting to deploy 2012 R2. Trying to deploy it as if it were 2012 will result in permission and scripting errors which will make it appear as if the machine is stuck on 100% complete.

[Jimmy Vance]

I don't think there is a B110i RAID driver for 2012 R2. You will need to switch the controller to plain SATA AHCI mode and do your RAID within the OS.

This is a software based RAID controller so there is no impact using OS RAID vs the B110 RAID driver

[EricG1793]

Thanks for the suggestion, SBrown. I booted Ubuntu live and for whatever reason was able to see both discs even though they were still on RAID 1. I used Ubuntu's Disks program to make one NTFS partition on each disc, formatting by writing zeros to the discs. It still didn't work. Then I installed Windows 7 on the server successfully, thinking I could update the firmware for Lights Out and the RAID controller itself, but no... guess it requires a server OS for those things to happen. But, lo and behold, I went to install 2012 again and it's working!