Hi All
Recently I acquired an old Server Motherboard (Tyan S2880) with dual AMD Opteron Processors
The rebuild was going great, I aim to create a Headless NAS box for the house that will shutdown automatically at night and boot automatically in the morning.
I finished building the server and installed the OS (Windows 7 Ultimate) on a 1TB SATA HDD that was plugged into a RAID card (a LSI Logic 3000 Series 4 Port SATA rev. 2 card) on PCI-X slot #1 so it was acting as a SATA expansion card. I wanted to avoid using the onboard SATA ports since they were only SATA rev. 1.
I then Purchased a Second RAID card (this time a Promise FastTrac SX4300 SATA card) and installed it on PCI-X slot #3 and created a Logical Drive with 4 500GB Drives Running in RAID 5.
I rebooted and then Windows would not boot from the original HDD on the 1st RAID card, it would finish the 2nd RAID Card BIOS prompts and then just stop, with a black screen and a single white underscore in the top left corner, even the Motherboard BIOS was inaccessible.
I think I configured the Boot Priorities correctly in all both the Motherboard BOIS and the RAID card BIOS.
To fix this I had 2 Options, disable the logical drive on the 2nd RAID card (as everything worked with no Logical Drive Configured) or press spacebar at boot to skip the 2nd RAID card’s BIOS then Windows and the Motherboard BIOS would become accessible and work fine.
I took the latter option but since this is a headless computer, I would like to be able to boot it without a screen, therefore pushing Spacebar at boot every time is not an option. I then got an old Keyboard and taped the Spacebar down permanently as this would not affect remote desktop or HDD sharing. This meant Windows booted fine and I could use the RAID array
But then every time the computer booted it would get to Windows 7, but not boot and open up Windows Boot Manager (I assume the Spacebar is the key that opens it), asking me which OS to select, (there is only one option which is Windows 7) again I don't want to have to push Enter down each time the computer boots. (lol: Taping the Enter key down aswell affects the boot so I cannot do that.)
AIMS:
Boot Windows on the Single 1TB HDD while leaving the fast RAID 5 Array intact and user accessible
Fix the Windows Boot problem with a RAID array on the second card configured
Change the Windows Boot Manager key to a key that is not the Spacebar or disable WBM completely
(the command: "bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu no". does not work for me)
Thankyou for your time,
Mitchell
Recently I acquired an old Server Motherboard (Tyan S2880) with dual AMD Opteron Processors
The rebuild was going great, I aim to create a Headless NAS box for the house that will shutdown automatically at night and boot automatically in the morning.
I finished building the server and installed the OS (Windows 7 Ultimate) on a 1TB SATA HDD that was plugged into a RAID card (a LSI Logic 3000 Series 4 Port SATA rev. 2 card) on PCI-X slot #1 so it was acting as a SATA expansion card. I wanted to avoid using the onboard SATA ports since they were only SATA rev. 1.
I then Purchased a Second RAID card (this time a Promise FastTrac SX4300 SATA card) and installed it on PCI-X slot #3 and created a Logical Drive with 4 500GB Drives Running in RAID 5.
I rebooted and then Windows would not boot from the original HDD on the 1st RAID card, it would finish the 2nd RAID Card BIOS prompts and then just stop, with a black screen and a single white underscore in the top left corner, even the Motherboard BIOS was inaccessible.
I think I configured the Boot Priorities correctly in all both the Motherboard BOIS and the RAID card BIOS.
To fix this I had 2 Options, disable the logical drive on the 2nd RAID card (as everything worked with no Logical Drive Configured) or press spacebar at boot to skip the 2nd RAID card’s BIOS then Windows and the Motherboard BIOS would become accessible and work fine.
I took the latter option but since this is a headless computer, I would like to be able to boot it without a screen, therefore pushing Spacebar at boot every time is not an option. I then got an old Keyboard and taped the Spacebar down permanently as this would not affect remote desktop or HDD sharing. This meant Windows booted fine and I could use the RAID array
But then every time the computer booted it would get to Windows 7, but not boot and open up Windows Boot Manager (I assume the Spacebar is the key that opens it), asking me which OS to select, (there is only one option which is Windows 7) again I don't want to have to push Enter down each time the computer boots. (lol: Taping the Enter key down aswell affects the boot so I cannot do that.)
AIMS:
Boot Windows on the Single 1TB HDD while leaving the fast RAID 5 Array intact and user accessible
Fix the Windows Boot problem with a RAID array on the second card configured
Change the Windows Boot Manager key to a key that is not the Spacebar or disable WBM completely
(the command: "bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu no". does not work for me)
Thankyou for your time,
Mitchell
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