Table of Contents • • • • Frustrated by this, and intending not to make another wasted trip, we purchased an identical RAID controller — a 3Ware 8006-2LP — and studied the process from home. We ended up creating a slipstreamed SBS2003 installation CD with the 3Ware driver built in. With the increasing number of machines being shipped without floppy drives (and the popularity of cheap, high-performance RAID controllers), we think that this problem is going to get worse before it gets better. It took some amount of time to figure out all the issues involved, but it worked the first time: wow! This Tech Tip describes our process.

Our example applies strictly to Windows Small Business Server 2003, though we're fairly sure that it can be extrapolated to other modern systems, such as XP or Server 2003. We list some resources these other versions at the end of this Tip. The usual Windows Server installation process During the initial CD-based Windows Server 2003 installation, it allows for pressing F6 very early in the process to request prompting for a diskette containing any special drivers needed. This is mainly used for disk controllers to allow Windows to talk to the hard drive. It's unfortunate that the time window for pressing F6 is so short, and offers no confirmation that it was indeed pressed. The installation script scans the hardware and preloads many drivers, and eventually prompts the user to insert a floppy disk into A:; it's supposed to contain the third-party driver. This process only reads from the A: drive — there is no 'Browse' option to pull a file from the hard drive, the CD, or the network.

Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 Service Pack 1 offers the latest software and security updates to Windows Small Business Server 2003 (Windows SBS). Instant Artist Download. Hi Experts Need to reinstall MS SBS 2003 Std onto the original server after crash. While I have a legitimate license key, the original media could not be. Dr. Malachi York Books Pdf on this page.

It's gotta be the floppy. If all goes well, the add-on driver is loaded into the running system and used to access the hardware. One can tell that it's working by the fact that it actually sees the hard drive and offers to repartition and format it. Surprisingly (to us), a USB-based floppy drive worked just as we'd have expected a motherboard-based drive to perform. Robosapien Dance Machine Software. Some time later, after the hard drive has been formatted, the setup program requires the diskette again to copy the driver files while populating the new C: WINDOWS tree, but we found that the installer consistently refused to recognize the same USB floppy drive in any way. With no avenue for getting the driver onto the hard drive, the machine is dead in the water: can't continue installation, and starting over gets the same thing. A bit of searching the web shows that others have had similar issues, which suggests that it's not the same code which accesses the floppy driver in each case (there have been reports that HP brand USB floppy drives work, but we didn't dig into this at all).

Faced with the option of (a) giving up on the RAID controller, (b) opening the case to install a physical floppy drive, or (c) building a custom installation CD that had the proper driver built in. We chose (c). Building a Slipstreamed CD Though it took us a while to figure out this process, it's been a remarkably smooth one. We've run through this a couple of times and it's been flawless. Locate the custom drivers They're usually found on a CD that shipped with the hardware or available on the vendor's website, and they must be downloaded to the working system.