More progress....
New CD-ROM (not the 48x, but another one) was bad, so I couldn't try it. Since I had partial success with the original CD, I swapped that back in the box. I also took another look at all the cabling going to/from the drive cage, unplugged and replugged. I also removed the RAID card again and reseated. Pulled out and reseated the drive cage. Ran sys prep again.
Shortly after I was still having problems, so I reran DAAD. It looked like ANOTHER drive was potentially "bad" however it was not flagged as failed with an orange light, just not showing up as available. I yanked that drive out of the setup after rebooting.
Then things started to looking up:
I tried another SmartStart CD (one which was burned using a different machine) and it actually worked...sort of. I did have one small glitch near the end of the process where it's supposed to reboot for the OS load, but a process bombed. However, the build did continue on...
During the OS load, I got a corrupt file message....Tried again, got same message. Tried again with a different disc, got a missing file message.
So currently, I believe my Win2K advanced discs are trash for whatever reason. I'm going to try burning another copy (using a different machine) Monday to see if it makes a difference.
TO RECAP:
- Original CD drive appears to be fine
- 2 potentially bad drives in the raid were removed
- Bad SmartStart CD, one burned on a different system seems to work.
- OS disc appears to be bad, will try new copy on Monday.
More to come....
