Press F6 to load insanity
Originally published at Vitae Ordinatraliter. You can comment here or there.
Anyone who has had to repair win2003 on relatively newer RAID controllers will know about using a floppy disk to load the drivers into the setup environment. Unfortunately, most servers with newer RAID controllers don’t *have* a floppy drive - besides loading mass storage drivers during windows setup, what is the point?
The solution of course is to use a USB floppy drive. Often this works, but some USB floppy drives just don’t want to be recognised by windows setup. I had just such a situation today with an IBM x3650 and a TEAC USB floppy drive. After using the server as a pogo stick for about half an hour I happened upon the magic formula.
- Eject floppy from drive, unplug usb drive
- Hit F6 on bootup. Wait until you see the USB host controller drivers loaded. Plug in USB drive.
- Wait until it asks you to press ‘S’ to load storage drivers. Insert floppy into drive.
- Press ‘S’, load drivers, repair server, accept the gold and gems thrown at your feet.
Why does this work when simply plugging it in before booting up doesn’t? More to the point, why does Win03 insist on using floppy drives to load mass storage drivers into the setup environment? At least they’ve fixed that with Win08