Noob trying to setup Dell Poweredge 1300 server Please HELP

[Paul777]

Im pretty good with pcs but i have never worked on a server before. Let me give you some specs. 500mghz 256 ram. Raid 5, 3 internal harddrives. I have tried installing Win2k Pro, Win2k Adv Server, and WinXP. I can get everything to install, but as soon as the startup screen comes up it hangs. It gets to the screen where you see the progress indicator, but it never progresses. All I need the machine for is a personal computer. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[technome]

Is each operating system on it's own partition, or are multiple OSs installed on the same same one?

 

[Paul777]

I installed each one on there by themselves to see if any would work.

 

[technome]

If this is hardware raid are you sure you have the correct driver installed, installed at the beginning of the installations by pressing f6 to install the driver? Raid cards generally need a driver off a floppy.

 

[Paul777]

I have no idea what driver is installed. It had NT 4.0 on there when i got the server. I'll see if I can find the driver for the raid card. Thanks

 

[technome]

Find the driver for each OS on the system. Your description of the startup sound like a classic sympton of the incorrect driver being loaded; at this point the OSs are trying to load a driver they think is correct.

 

[Paul777]

If I take the raid out and just use one hard drive, will it work? I tried taking it out and just using one drive. I used the same cable for the raid and hooked up one drive to the scsi port on the motherboard. Is that what it is there for (scsi port on board)? Will the speed improve any if I go with one drive?

 

[Paul777]

What does perc, perc2/dc, and perc2/sc mean? Im not sure which driver to choose.

 

[technome]

What does Perc mean, Poweredge expanadable raid controller, just a naming convention for Dells various raid adapters made by other manufacturers. Call Dell, with machine serial number they can tell you which adapter you have, and the exact drivers you need. I believe the Perc 2 is an ultra 2 capable of 80 Mb/s/per channel. SC stands for single channel, dc for dual channel.

 

[Paul777]

I tried what you suggested and I have the same thing happening. Any other suggestions? Maybe a firmware update?

 

[Paul777]

I tried upgrading the firmware on the raid card and I am still stuck in the same spot. Any other suggestions?

 

[dgallegos]

I have the same issue with a server and i have to kill the raid and resetup with new raid because of some old existing files from a nt 4.0 server install. but if your going to use it for a workstation then you really dont even need raid. But thats my personal idea

 

[Paul777]

I have tried taking the raid out and I still have the same problem. Any idean what it could be?

 

[RexNoctis]

I have the same server, but I took the easy way out, I installed a 20GB IDE drive and loaded Windows 2003 AS onto it, it picked up the drivers for the RAID automatically, I then configured it as a RAID5 purely used for storage.