Recently I decided to virtualize all three of the primary servers that I have running on my network. To do this I decided to install Windows Server 2008 R2 on two new servers. To save space I chose smaller cases and to save money I left out the optical drives since I have a USB DVD drive that would work for my installations. In addition I downloaded the latest drivers onto a large flash drive in preparation for the install.
The motherboard that I chose is the MSI 890FXA-GD65 which supports USB boot as well as RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD. So, I chose to run a RAID 1 setup with two disks. After setting the array up in the BIOS I inserted the USB DVD drive, a flash drive with the RAID drivers, and cranked up the machine. Things moved pretty fast and I landed on the screen for selecting the drive to which I wanted to install Windows. It was blank and so I simply loaded the drivers from the flash drive and the RAID drive appeared with full capacity. Normally the next thing you should do is select the drive and hit the next button, but when I did that I got this wonderful error message:
“Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. See the Setup log files for more information.”
To make a long story short I had a heck of a time figuring out the cause of my problem. In the end what worked for me was leaving the USB Flash drive out of the system until I was ready to install the drivers. I inserted the flash drive, selected “Load Drivers” and when through the browsing, selecting and loading. Right after the drivers were finished loading I pulled the flash drive and then hit “Next”. And the rest, as they say, is history… Windows installed fine from that point on and within about 30 minutes my new server was up and running.
Tags: windows 2008, tips & tricks, hardware, general tech