Booting using the installation disc, we tried to reinstall the OS, but there were no disc found. We had to install the drivers for the raid adapter using a USB drive. It appears that the drivers for the raid were not installed. Booting again to the recovery console, and installing the raid drivers, the drive was then found using DISKPART. On boot the server is picking up on the WIndows (2008 r2) server image and kicks off install process. When I get to the select disks point the RAID volume isn't showing up. NO hardware changes have been made. My colleague HAS reset the BIOS. I've put the disks in RAID mode. I'm not familiar with this this PERC card and I've not had this issue before.
I did an update on a clients T330 Server from H310 to H710 last night. They have VMWare 5.0 installed with a single VM. Had to add the datastore back in but that was all fine. Improvements weren’t that great. I enabled adaptive read caching and write back caching for the vdisk – performance after was slightly faster than prior, but I wouldn’t say moonbeams. They only have 2 mirrored SAS disks, so probably just an IOP limitation of the disk.
Still, I would have expected better. I ended up changing the D: and E: (data) drives of the virtual server from VMWare LSI Logic Parallel controller to PVSCSI, performance jumped up for those drives tenfold. I’ve left it on PVSCSI, even though they say PVSCSI isn’t recommended for DAS storage, its just too good not too use.
I will need to do this as soon as my PERC H710 replacement controller arrives the first week of 2017. One question for you– did you or anyone else who has done this execute a consistency check after replacing the PERC controller? I have four 3TB drives running RAID 10. Consistency checks take a God-awful long time on my machine. I am doing this on a Precision workstation, so I do not have the option of using OMSA. Dell only allows OMSA execution on a server. Don’t get me wrong– I do understand the importance of running a CC.
I am actually running one right now with my PERC H310. It has been running now for about three days at only 48% complete. This is with it being run directly from the BIOS adapter config utility. Based on my run time so far, a full CC may take seven complete days. I just replaced the PERC H310 with my new PERC H710.
It was extremely easy to do. I did not even have to import an external configuration. The H710 did this automatically with the import option not even enabled in its BIOS. Right now the H710 is performing a patrol read, which the H310 was not able to do. I will allow that to finish before starting a CC.
I enabled write back and adaptive read ahead. Right now Windows boots up faster with the new controller.
The latest MegaRAID is showing that the patrol read for all four drives will be complete in 4 hours and 15 minutes. The only issue I have run into is that MegaRAID showed some error related to the H710’s firmware when Windows had initially started the first time. This same version of MegaRAID never showed this for the H310 controller. However, I am still able to launch and use MegaRAID successfully. I am ignoring this error for now. I have to use MegaRAID, since I cannot use OMSA on Windows 10 Professional.
So far, all is good! My CC through the H710 BIOS config utility completed against the same four hard drives in approximately six hours. This was significantly faster than the H310 could complete it. Finally, the error from MegaRAID I reported above happened only once after changing the PERC controller. On my next reboot, I did not see the error again.
It appears that the MegaRAID services were expecting the H310 controller on the next restart of Windows. Launching MegaRAID again appears to have resolved the issue, so there are probably settings saved locally related to the controller. This is MegaRAID version 16.05.04.
Hello, I am trying to install Windows 2008 R1 SP1 on T420. However, it does not detect any drives and asks me to load driver diskette. Now, I downloaded the driver from: Put it on a USB and then the installation wizard detect the USB but then it says 'No signed device drivers were found'.
Reading carefully above driver download page, they have mentioned the installation instructions, it is mentioned how to load the driver during installation. HOWEVER, the real problem lies here. These instruction are for a '.ZIP' format of the driver. Whereas, they only provide '.EXE' format of the driver to download. So, whatever the instruction provided on above driver download page for loading the driver during the installation does not work. And, I could not find where to download the '.ZIP' format of the driver. Could you help me please.
What am I missing here? Dheerajkabra, What you need to do is run that file you download from a Windows system. It will extract files to a folder, copy those file to the USB and then do the following steps. Power on the system and boot to the Microsoft Windows Server CD.
Follow the screen instructions until you reach the 'Where do you want to install Windows?' Insert the USB flash drive that contains the driver files you extracted. At the Load Driver sub-screen, click Browse. Select the directory that has the controller driver files. At the Select the driver to be installed window, select the driver for the installed controller/OS and Click Next to load the driver files.
After the driver loads you will return to the 'Where do you want to install Windows?' Screen, press 'Next' again to continue the installation process. If you have any yellow bangs after the install you will likely need this download as well. OS Driver Pack - Let me know how it goes. Thanks for the ftp link. I downloaded the driver from ftp and then was able to extract it. Then I put it on an USB and the Installation wizard detects it fine as below: I tried selecting both above drivers one by one.
Once I select the driver and hit 'Next', it has a green bar running on the screen as if it is trying to read the Driver. After about 30 seconds, it returns to previous screen where it says 'No drives found'.
And again I am presented an option to load the driver by browsing to the USB. Here is the screenshot: Is there any other driver I should try? OR Am I missing something here?
Thanks for you time. That was it!!! There was no Virtual Device created.
Hence I got in to the Raid controller by pressing 'CTRL + R' at the time of booting and created one RAID 0 device. Then the windows (of-course along with the drivers that were on USB) detected this drive in multiple partitions and the installation started running on 'Primary' partition. Thanks theflash1932 for the ftp link. I would have never found that creepy link myself to get the correct driver. Besides, this link is missing from the T420 Driver Download page where it provides only the '.EXE' format of Driver. Thanks Chris for the virtual device hint. It got my brain spinning in right direction.
Both above suggestion helped me together.