SATA RAID Drivers for Gigabyte Motherboard?

Question

I am trying to set up a new server, and I'm having a problem. When I tried to install Windows Server 2003, it said there were no hard drives detected. There are actually two SATA hard drives set up in a mirror. Our origional IT Manager put the computer together and set up the raid, but we never installed an OS on it, and now he's in Iraq and I'm the newbie. I did figure out that I needed to install the SATA RAID drivers from the gigabyte website to the motherboard...so I downloaded the driver, put it on a floppy, inserted the floppy, and tried to boot the server to install the drivers. It didn't work, it just keeps asking me to remove the disk and reboot the computer. Can anyone tell me how to get this driver installed on the motherboard so I can get this OS loaded and the new server running???

I did try the f6 option to add additional drivers, but my floppy disk has the .exe file on it and it won't recognize it....

Answer 1

Have you tried booting from the MS Windows Server 2003 CD and then loading the floppy disk with the drivers when the installation prompts an option to load additional drivers? You are not loading drivers on to the motherboard, you are including them as part of the OS installation. The drivers you downloaded to the floppy disk are not part of a bootable image, they are meant to be included as part of an OS installation.

I'm guessing you are working with hardware RAID so you may also want to verify that the BIOS is setup with the RAID enabled and as the primary boot device.

** Edit **
You may be placing the wrong files on the floppy then. If the download from Gigabyte included a .exe file it could be a self extracting zip file. You might want to check the website you downloaded the driver from first but my guess is that you need to execute the file on another system and then that will prompt for a floppy disk to store the drivers or you may need to copy the contents from some default extract directory to that floppy drive.

Answer 2

The drivers for the SATA raid will NOT have an EXE file. You need to run the EXE file on your computer.

This will open a small program that will erase, format and copy the required driver files to the floppy disk.

Then just do what you did before.

Answer 3

I think the problem is in your BIOS. Restart your computer and press Delete. Get to the screen that shows HDD configuration. You might have to enable SATA RAID. Set it to 0 or 1, correct me if I'm wrong, 0 will write to both and 1 will mirror. Try it out.