Article ID: 000005834 What is the problem? Unable to install the AHCI or RAID driver using the F6 installation procedure because the system does not have a floppy drive. How to fix it Use one of these methods to resolve the issue: • Attach a USB floppy drive. You might need to enter the system BIOS and set the USB emulation mode to floppy. If your USB floppy drive is not recognized, try a different USB floppy drive. • Create a bootable copy of the Windows* setup disk that includes the RAID drivers.
You can use vlite to write it into the windows install cd (Y) i used to do it this way. Or nlite maybe. VLite is for Vista only. Peter Lyon said: put them on a usb stick:), just select it instead of a floppy. I think that works:) XP & 2K3 setup routines don't have support for loading drivers from a USB stick.
This procedure is called slipstreaming. Rerun the setup with the slipstream version. Downloads: Related topics.
Ok, so I searched around a bit, and found lots of posts in other forums for people wondering if they can install 3rd party drivers from something other than diskette. From personal experience, I know that XP-64 is the first XP-ish OS'es to bother looking anywhere but a floppy drive seen as 'A: ' for the drivers. My old 3.5 floppy is out of commission, so I bought a USB floppy, as a friend of mine who as done scores of server installs always uses one. Everything seems to be going along as expected. I hit 'F6' when prompted. It asks me to specify an additional device, which I do.
I hear the floppy being accessed. It brings up the name of my SATA RAID controller card, and then continues with setup. The problem is that, after formatting, it asks me to put into A: the diskette containing the SATA driver (and it names the exact device it wants - my Promise Fasttrack blah blah blah), and then hit Ashta Chamma Serial Story. 'Enter.'
The disk is still in there, so I just hit 'Enter' - nothing. I rebooted and tried again - nothing.
Obviously, the drive is fully functional at the beginning of the install. There is no other way setup would know what controller card to look for. Yet, it demands the driver for the card, again, and refuses to look in the same location where it originally learned of the card.
The only options are F3 to quit or Enter to continue. I'm really bummed about having spent the extra effort to be prepared, and it working, but only halfway.
Any suggestions? Actually, no: the drivre doesn't have to be fully functional to account for what you're reporting.
AFAIK, all it needs is the PnP device ID in the.inf file. In fact, what is likely to be happening in your case is that the driver cannot be loaded although there is an antry for your OS and hardware in the.inf file but that the corresponding driver fails to load (maybe your floppy has a bad sector, maybe the card isn't what it pretends to be.) Anyway: I've done several install of windows 2003 server using RAID drivers from a USB flobby without any problem (that is, as long as I really had a good driver and floppy). It's definitely the correct card, unless someone clipped off all the legitimate chips and soldered on fakes. It's definitely not the disk. Copied all files off it successfully, then full formated it and copied all files back - all good. This also demonstrates that the drive itself is in good working condition.
This seems like one of those tricky nuances there would be some workaround for, though what exactly it is I have no idea. Again, the drive works fine the first time when it asks to specify additional SCSI devices. It reads the disk and copies the file.
How else would it know to ask specifically for the drivers for that card later on? It just seems ridiculous that the whole thing would work long enough for Server to recognize what kind of card it is, but then totally fail when it has to actually copy the driver to the windows directory. It should work provided you provide the correct files in the correct locations on the diskette. Also as a side of futher proof, if your motherboard supports USB floppies (most ca.1998 and later systems) you can even use an external USB floppy drive and diskette to load mass storage controllers (SCSI, RAID, ATA, etc) using NT 4.0, even though the OS (NT) doesn't support it (you still can use the usb floppy, but only during the blue screen setup portion).
I have not had problems with with under 2000/XP/2003 either. I've since ditched the FDC since 2001 and haven't had problems with loading SCSI drivers from USB with any of my lab machines. And I do a lot of lab installs. Often when I've seen symptoms like you are seeing I'll try to redownload the driver or get a different driver. Sometimes you just plain grab the wrong files are are missing files since your hiding OS files (dll, etc) in your current explorer properties or something (it happens to all of us).
The other option if you are still having trouble is to slipstream the RAID drivers onto a a custom copy of the 2003 CD. And if that doesn't work either you might still be doing something wrong or perhaps that driver is just plain not going to work. One thing you haven't mentioned is whether the optical drive you are loading 2003 from (Cd or DVD) is on the same controller for which you are trying to load the driver. If everthing is on the same controller you might try making the 4 boot diskettes and start installing 2003 from those instead of booting from the CD. Or try moving the CDROM to a different controller, once for which 2003 can already use a built-in driver.
I remember this was possibly an issue with Nt 4.0, so it might crop in the later OSs. I always either hang my opticals off of a 2940UW SCSI or the motherboard's built-in ATA controller. (or in the case of VMWare, a bootable.iso file) Then use the hard disks by themselves on my uber-7337 controller. So it hasn't been an issue for me in quite a while. Sly And Robbie A Dub Experience Rar.