Technical > Computer Hardware Help > PC Build/Won't load OS

PC Build/Won't load OS

No RAID card? ESX specifically does not like BIOS level type RAID (the type you appear to be using). As for Windows, they should all load just fine if you provide it the RAID drivers. The RAID level has nothing to do with this, this is entirely a driver issue. You may need to grab the drivers from Asus's website and dump them on a flash drive or something but Windows should work if you give it the drivers.

See here for ESX 5.x on that motherboard:
»www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.···t=M5A99X
»www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.···t=M5A99X

Note the commonalities, the storage controller works but only in AHCI mode (this is proven already since it sees your individual disks).

What guest OSes do you plan to run on this? If just Windows guests then go with either ESX or Hyper-V but if you plan to run anything else I would strongly recommend you go with ESX. It has MUCH better support for other OS brands compared to Hyper-V. The downside to this is you either will have to settle for individual disks or grab a supported 3rd party RAID card (the Dell PERC 6 is my personal favorite and does not need to be in a Dell system either, it's also fairly cheap and is a re-badged LSI so it's a good one too).

reply to rustydusty
Do I bother doing a BIOS update or is this strictly going to be the drivers and the BIOS won't fix the issue at all?

If you need/want the IOMMU device pass-through capability in ESX, the links mention a specific BIOS update that enables that. Though if you do need that, and want to use ESX, a BIOS update won't solve it anyway and you will need to settle for individual drives or a RAID controller. Otherwise I would follow the "if it ain't broke.." thought.

Grab the current RAID drivers from ASUS and try Windows again. If it still doesn't see the drives then we could look at something else causing it but I really suspect it's simply a driver issue. I know you mentioned you gave it the motherboard disk but providing it with the latest drivers would be better.

reply to rustydusty
I managed to get Hyper-V 2008 loaded by downloading the latest RAID drivers. Now I need to somehow get the driver for the nic to load, as there's no network connectivity whatsoever. I can download them throw them on same USB, however what's going to be the easiest to pull them onto the hyper-v?

reply to rustydusty
Looks like this is the only way. If there's any other way, please let me know.

»www.davidorlo.com/articles/virtu···v-server

For drivers inside a VM you use the integration tools under Hyper-V or VMWare Tools under ESX. With Server 2008 and newer, the integration tools are built in but will of course need updating. The virtual machines won't actually use the same drivers as the host so don't worry about that (unless you are doing pass-through, which Hyper-V doesn't support).

reply to rustydusty
sorry, the drivers on the host itself, not a VM. I have yet to move any of my VM's off the old box to the new yet, as I don't have any network now. The Hyper-v got installed properly with the RAID drivers, now just need to get these NIC drivers on the host now. The link was for a driver install on a host I thought.

Ahh I see now. I saw the link and thought it was about hyper-v so I immediately thought of the guests. With server core and hyper-v server, you have to use the CLI. You CAN get device manager access remotely but it's read only. Honestly I'm not that familiar with some of the utilities needed to manage server core, you could try the directions in that link, it should work. Someone else may know of a better way but I don't, sorry.

reply to rustydusty
I will give that a shot in about an hour when I get home. I'll report back with success hopefully. Appreciate all the help!

reply to rustydusty
Well that worked! Just moving over 2 VM's off the old host to test for a while first. Kind of wished I changed everything back to the raid 1+0 instead of just one set of raid 1 and other raid 0. Would there even be a huge better performance wide with raid 1+0 with 4 drives that are only 1TB 7200rpm WD Green Caviers?

Just curious if I should stop and rebuild the array as a raid 1+0 instead of one array as just raid 1? Will there even be much performance increase with 7200rpm drives? The raid 1+0 it will have all 4 drives, but currently only 2 of them are the raid 1 array, other two in raid 0. Do I bother redoing it again or not?

RAID 0 will cause you to lose all data in the event of a drive failure in that group. If nothing else I would rebuild that array to RAID 1, but I would suggest RAID 10 instead. Now that you know what it entails, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to rebuild.

reply to rustydusty
Rebuilding quickly now! Hopefully won't take too long. Any idea how two of the disks are only 3GB/s and other two are 6GB/s will work together?

They should be OK, none of them will come close to saturating the bus. You could put them all on the SATA 300 ports if you have 2 more available (or move them all to SATA 600 but I suspect you don't have that many of those ports).

reply to rustydusty
According to manual and the site, all 6 ports are 6Gb/s speed wise...hmm

»www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as···13131874

And that's what I get for not looking closely

I briefly looked at the board on Newegg but didn't look closely at the specs, I saw 6 ports and figured they were in a 2/4 or 4/2 split. What model drives do you have?

reply to rustydusty
Well got everything rebuilt. Moved over two VM's and one went perfect. The second is an exchange 2007 VM and it doesn't seem to be getting all the hyper-v guest tools to get the network side and such. Will keep trying, though. First one moved perfectly.

Were they originally hyper-v VMs or were they something else? No matter what, they will have a lot of devices to reinstall since you're changing hosts but if they were hyper-v before they should still work. You may need to fully uninstall the integration services and let it reinstall them.

reply to rustydusty
Yes, they were all hyper-v VM's beforehand and on an AMD cpu as well. They all worked after reinstalling the tools. Everything seems to be humming along just fine!

reply to rustydusty
Well, here's some pics now that it's running and all VM's have been moved off the old machine to this one. I've ordered more memory, as 16GB is almost being reached. Should be enough for everything with 32GB memory for home server





Thanks to everyone for all the help, greatly appreciated!