Adventures in RAID part III

Aztec is now in bits on my floor having had the floppy drive taken out of it. I plug it into Olmec and boot up this time using my Ubuntu Server 7.10 alternative install CD in it. It goes through the normal stages. I manage to find a floppy disk, stick it in my desktop, stick my USB pen in the desktop and copy the driver over to the floppy disk. I then take the floppy disk out and put it in the floppy drive now attached to Olmec. Meanwhile Olmec decides it can’t find any hard drives and asks me if I want to load a driver. I say yes and trawl down to the bottom of the big list of drivers it gives me to inform it that the driver isn’t on there. It then attempts to load from the floppy drive but in fact just stops with a blank blue screen at this point.

I’d actually given up on it loading and started blogging when I suddenly got a message saying it had failed to load any drivers from the floppy disk. It wasn’t like I was being impatient – we’re talking a 10-15 minute wait here. I tried it twice with no luck. I also tried loading the HighPoint drivers that come with Ubuntu (though not for my RAID card) with no luck.

Next plan – I insert the CD into my desktop and the floppy drive so that the setup program can create a Windows driver disk. I’m sceptical about doing this on an XP box for a Windows Server 2003 install but it doesn’t seem to make a difference as the program will create drivers for any OS including Linux distros and only had one option that seems to cover all versions of Windows. Except that now Windows can’t read my floppy. It says it isn’t formatted. Even though it was when I copied the file over 30 minutes earlier. Even worse, it says it can’t format the disk now.

I install a fresh floppy disk and this time Windows reads it. The CD however can’t. It just brings up an I/O error message. I insert the original disk and Windows brings up a formatting box. But then gives me a nerror saying it was unable to complete the format. I take the original disk out and but the second one back in. Having re-launched the HighPoint software it allows me to continue this time. It also appears to complete successfully.

Turns out the floppy drive in Olmec wasn’t actually working. I manage to get it working and go back to Ubuntu. This time Ubuntu detects it. But instead of loading the driver as it should have done it decides that the floppy disk is a hard drive and suggests I partition it to install Ubuntu onto. I eventually find a way round this but Ubuntu then just says there aren’t any drivers and refuses to do anything.

Back to Windows. I get as far as it asking me to load the extra drivers and insert the floppy disk in. It can’t find them. I try it again and suddenly it can find them. It finally picks up my hard drive and begins partitioning and then installing Windows. Finally we might be getting somewhere.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.