Installing 2000 server

[Michael Palumbo]

Im trying to install Windows 2000 server on a compaq Proliant 5000. After it installs it gives me this error, "A disk Read Error Occurred. Press Ctrl + ALT + Del to restart. Are 5000 Proliants able to handle Windows 2000 server? I tried to find a list of supported OS but didnt have much luck. The compaq is a handyme down with 1 PPro 200 mhz chip and 128 megs of ram with 3 scsi harddrives at 4.3 gigs a piece.

Thanks

Mike

[Terry Hutchings]

According to the Hardware Compatability List for Windows 2000:
ProLiant 5000 Model 6/200 (2p) Compatible
ProLiant 5000 Model 6/200 (4p) Compatible
ProLiant 5000R Model 6/200 (2p) Compatible
ProLiant 5000R Model 6/200 (4p) Compatible

These should work fine, as well as the 1p models. You may actually have a drive or controller problem.

[Michael Palumbo]

I dont have much experience with Servers as I am trying to learn. I have insight manager 7.0 for server configuration is there something on there I can use to fix this problem. Specifically I have the Compaq managment CD and the SmartStart for servers release version is 5.40. Is there anything on these CD's to help me fix the problem.

Thanks again

Mike

[Bill O'Brien_3]

Lots of possibilities here. Are you saying it gets right to the end of the Win 2000 GUI install, and then you get this error? Or just that it fails on the initial text-mode portion of the load before it has booted Windows 2000? It would make a difference to how you might fix it. One thing to check would be the System BIOS - a 5000 needs to be on at least version 4.30A dated 30/4/99. Also have you set up the disks in a RAID array before starting the load (assuming server has a Smartarray card)? Recommend you start by preparing the server with the Smartstart disk. It will guide you through a lot of this. HTH.

[Michael Palumbo]

I have the bios updated to 4/30/99 I configured the raid for raid 0 and I was able to install windows 2000. At boot though it gives me that error of "Disk read error occurred"

Mike

[Colin_30]

Hi Mike, I had exactly the same problem with a correctly configured 5000r installing Win2k Advanced Server on a NTFS partition. I unfortunatley didn't look too far into it since the install worked perfectly if the partition was formated in FAT32, although IIS is a bit glitchy in FAT.
Hope this is some help or gives someone enough information to identify your issue.

[Lars Briedis]

I have had that same problem today. I have a Netserver LPR with Raid 1. Tried first Windows 2000k 17gig partition. Got the error. I knew about this limitation but my other server has one big 18 gig partition. Started over with a 4 gig windows created partition. Worked great until I allocated the rest of the partition in windows for my F: Drive. When I re-booted it gave me that Unable to read error.

After some inspection of my 3 other LPR servers I noticed they all have a 31MB FAT EISA HP Utility Partition. I am not an expert about this partition but I belive it contains boot information, etc. Anyway am in the process of creating this with my Navigator Bootable CD and hopefully it will work.

I will post later my findings, but I am pretty sure this is the problem since my 3 other LPR servers run like a champ and all have NTFS single and multi partitions large and small.

[Lars Briedis]

I have had that same problem today. I have a Netserver LPR with Raid 1. Tried first Windows 2000k 17gig partition. Got the error. I knew about this limitation but my other server has one big 18 gig partition. Started over with a 4 gig windows created partition. Worked great until I allocated the rest of the partition in windows for my F: Drive. When I re-booted it gave me that Unable to read error.

After some inspection of my 3 other LPR servers I noticed they all have a 31MB FAT EISA HP Utility Partition. I am not an expert about this partition but I belive it contains boot information, etc. Anyway am in the process of creating this with my Navigator Bootable CD and hopefully it will work.

I will post later my findings, but I am pretty sure this is the problem since my 3 other LPR servers run like a champ and all have NTFS single and multi partitions large and small.

[Lars Briedis]

I have had that same problem today. I have a Netserver LPR with Raid 1. Tried first Windows 2000k 17gig partition. Got the error. I knew about this limitation but my other server has one big 18 gig partition. Started over with a 4 gig windows created partition. Worked great until I allocated the rest of the partition in windows for my F: Drive. When I re-booted it gave me that Unable to read error.

After some inspection of my 3 other LPR servers I noticed they all have a 31MB FAT EISA HP Utility Partition. I am not an expert about this partition but I belive it contains boot information, etc. Anyway am in the process of creating this with my Navigator Bootable CD and hopefully it will work.

I will post later my findings, but I am pretty sure this is the problem since my 3 other LPR servers run like a champ and all have NTFS single and multi partitions large and small.

[Lars Briedis]

I have had that same problem today. I have a Netserver LPR with Raid 1. Tried first Windows 2000k 17gig partition. Got the error. I knew about this limitation but my other server has one big 18 gig partition. Started over with a 4 gig windows created partition. Worked great until I allocated the rest of the partition in windows for my F: Drive. When I re-booted it gave me that Unable to read error.

After some inspection of my 3 other LPR servers I noticed they all have a 31MB FAT EISA HP Utility Partition. I am not an expert about this partition but I belive it contains boot information, etc. Anyway am in the process of creating this with my Navigator Bootable CD and hopefully it will work.

I will post later my findings, but I am pretty sure this is the problem since my 3 other LPR servers run like a champ and all have NTFS single and multi partitions large and small.

[Doug Eaton_1]

Mike, I'll assume you have an Original SmartArray controller or posibly a Smart-2/E, and during Windows setup you selected the unpartioned space to create your boot partition, and opted to use all of the space. While NT 4.0 would have prevented you from using more that 4 GB, since there were some boot partition size limitations with NT, Windows 2000 does not have those same restrictions, unfortunately, your hardware has limitations of its own. When you run SmartStart, you will generally end up with all drives assigned to the same array, no need to chage this, but that would have created a 3-disk raid 5 array, with about 8.6 GB of usable space, you can increase that to about 12.9 GB if you don't want or need any fault tolerance, in my opinion you do, these are old drives and one will probably fail during the install, if you can obtain additional drives, you could have a raid 5 array with an on-line spare (recomneded in a production environment).

To resolve this issue, boot to your Windows 2000 CD, when you get to the screen where you select the install partition, select the partition you previously created, and press "D" to delete it, press "L" to really delete it, select the unpartitioned space, press "C" to create a partition, and this time make sure you select a smaller partition size, something like 4000 MB (4 GB)should work fine, but you could go smaller if you wanted the bulk of the remaining space assigned to your "data" partition which you can create later after windows has been installed successfully.

doug...