Dell R900 Windows Install Issues

[TrainingWheeels]

Ive got an r900 with 64 gigs of ram and four of the 5000 series xeons. Boots to BIOS fine, but when I try to install a windows server software (2018) it recognizes the drive 0 but is unable to install or make partitions of it. Any suggestions would be helpful, I've just begun my journey into servers. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

There is no windows server 2018, so thats part of yourp roblem.

 

What is the raid card setup to?

 

There are also issues with new version of windows server and some older servers.

 

Id probably suggest you install a hypervisor on the hardware like esxi or proxmox, and then run a windows vm. This hav many advantages and  is normally much easier to manage.

[jj9987]

What is this "windows server software (2018)" you are talking about? Latest is Windows Server 2016 and 2019 is in preview.

What drive do you have, is it connected directly to motherboard or through RAID card or is it part of some other kind of disk setup?

[TrainingWheeels]

I'm an idiot, its Windows server 2016. The drive itself is a 300 gig Fujitsu 2.5 HDD. As for how it is connected, I believe its through an eight drive hotswappable raid set-up with the controller being a "PERC 6i SAS 6/iR". 

 

 

heres the spec list:

https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/pe_R900_spec_sheet.pdf

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, TrainingWheeels said:

I'm an idiot, its Windows server 2016. The drive itself is a 300 gig Fujitsu 2.5 HDD. As for how it is connected, I believe its through an eight drive hotswappable raid set-up with the controller being a "PERC 6i SAS 6/iR". 

 

 

heres the spec list:

https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/pe_R900_spec_sheet.pdf

did you setup a raid array, you need to do that, make a single raid 0 here.

 

Do a diskpart clean here.

[TrainingWheeels]

I did go through and clean through diskpart, I at least remembered that bit. As for setting the raid array, how should I do such?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, TrainingWheeels said:

I did go through and clean through diskpart, I at least remembered that bit. As for setting the raid array, how should I do such?

when booting it says something like press ctrl + r to enter raid menu.

 

edit: also why a r900? that system is slow and very power hungry, its cheaper to get a newer server if you want it use it due to the very high power consumption.

[TrainingWheeels]

Ill have to check, Ill be quite happy to get it up and running so I don't have to hear those fans blasting. 

[Razor Blade]

Why an R900... I would have to venture a guess. Got to start somewhere... a lot of people get into old servers by buying a super cheap system. Plus that R900 has a gargantuan 4U case so I would imagine it wouldn't be too difficult with some case modding to stuff in some more modern hardware in the future.

 

As for the issue. Make sure when you go into the Perc RAID controller menu your drive shows up as a virtual drive so your OS can interact with it. If you need a step by step, check this video.

 

Hope that helps