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View Full Version : W2K Service Pack conflict with RAID card? (W2K)



A_Muskin_Man
09-26-2002, 03:32 PM
Hi, I have a computer with the following components:
-Asus P4B533 mainboard with 768 megs of DDR 2100 RAM
-MSI 8851 GeForce 3 Ti 200 with 128 megs of memory(Latest Drivers installed)
-Intel P4 2.0Ghz CPU
-Promise Ultra ATA/100 controller card
-Promise FastTrak 100 TX2 RAID Card
-2 Western Digital 100 GB HDDs with 8mb Cache on the RAID card in a mirrored setup
-Linksys NIC
-Plextor PlexCombo DVD/CD-RW Drive
-LS 120 Drive on Promise Ultra ATA/100 controller card
-Iomega Zip 250 Drive on Promise Ultra ATA/100 controller card
On this computer I’m running Windows 2000 without any Service Packs installed. I decided to add SP3. I installed the Service Pack & rebooted as instructed. Everything proceeded properly until the boot process reached the "Starting Windows" screen where you can push F8 for other starting options. The computer hung at that point & the boot process proceeded no further. Fortunately for me I use GoBack. I just reverted the hard drive back to before the Service Pack installation. Of course, W2K booted up properly after the GoBack revert. I then tried SP2. The same thing happened, so I used GoBack to revert again. W2K booted up properly once again. I went to Microsoft’s site & tried to get some info from the KB, but nothing seemed to come up that applied to this situation. I suspect that the problem is with the RAID setup. But I don’t know for sure. I’m guessing that if I break the RAID array & attached the HDD to an IDE connector and then applied the Service Pack that it might not hang on me on the reboot. At this point I need some help from you experts. I’d rather not break the RAID array until I know that attaching the HDD to the IDE connector is the way to fix my problem. I sincerely thank all of you who may contribute to helping me fix this problem.

iTwins
11-01-2002, 06:29 PM
Funny you mentioned this because I also have almost exactly the same hardware components for my home server but did not encounter any problem with SP3:

Asus P4B533 w/512MB
Intel 1.8 (o/c 2.4ghz)
ATi 8500
Promise Ultra ATA/100 built-in
Promise FastTrak 133 TX2 RAID external
2 x 160GB ATA/133 HDDs to the TX2 controller
2 x 120GB ATA/100 HDDs to the built-in controller
etc., etc.

I upgraded to SP3 with no problems but then, rather than using RAID0/1, I simply hook the 160GB drives to the RAID controller simply to workaround the 137GB limitation for ATA/100 cards.
I also reinstalled my Win2k Adv. Server from scratch and not a problem whatsoever.

However, I do remember seeing in Microsoft Technet mentioning there are SP3 conflicts with other unnamed RAID controllers.

The RAID drivers I use are from the box, v2.0.0.21.