Installing Windows 2000 on your Classic NetRAID and NetRAID-1"

The Monitoring software that supports the HP NetRAID cards runs on both Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and Microsoft Windows 2000. However, the cards D4943A HP NetRAID and D4992A HP NetRAID-1 are not supported under Microsoft Windows 2000 by HP. The software does supports all versions of the HP NetRAID cards, which are supported under Microsoft Windows 2000.  "The cards D4943A HP NetRAID and D4992A HP NetRAID-1 are not supported under Microsoft Windows 2000." But users have installed Windows 2000 with out problems. Heres the ins and outs.

 

Make sure the NetRAID card is in a supported PCI slot 

NetRAID-1 (D4992A)or NetRAID (D4943A) must be used in PCI Bus Zero

For performance reasons it is recommended to install the NetRAID-1 (D4992A) or NetRAID (D4943A) in a PCI bus that is part of bus zero.
Note: This recommendation is only for these two part numbers.

Server

Bus 0 slots

LXr 8500

P1, P2

LXr 8000

P1, P2

LXr Pro 8

P1, P2, P3, P4

LX/LXr Pro

P1, P2, P3

LPr

P1, P2

LH Pro/LHII/LD

P9

E60

P1, P2

E50

All slots

LC2/LC3

P5, P6

LH3/LH4

P7, P8

A Simple and more elegant solution for your installation

"The cards D4943A HP NetRAID and D4992A HP NetRAID-1 are not supported under Microsoft Windows 2000."
HP and MS have deemed that these controllers are not compliant Windows 2000. But an architecture that IS supported is installing Windows 2000 on a drive attached to the onboard Adaptec SCSI controller. We also recommend this. Most Netservers can be configured with one or better yet, two common tray drives. Windows 2000 can be installed on a common tray drive and a software mirror can be created to a second for redundancy. Then the RAID drives can be used to house all the servers applications, application data and user data.  

The boot partition of Windows 2000 must be less than 8 GB

The HP NetRAID-1 (D4992A) adapter has an 8 GB limit for the boot partition. If you are going to boot from devices connected to an HP NetRAID-1 (D4992A) or an HP NetRAID (D4943A) controller, be sure that you don't set the boot partition any larger than 8 GB during the Windows 2000 installation procedure.

Some Upgrades have had trouble with boot partitions > 1GB 

SYMPTOMS

When you install Windows 2000 on a Hewlett-Packard (HP) NetServer with a system partition larger than one gigabyte (GB) in size, you receive the following error message when the computer restarts:
DISK READ ERROR CTRL+ALT+DEL TO REBOOT
Sometimes when windows will not allow you to create a partition greater than 1gb, it's because it does not understand the geometry of the logical drive given by the netraid card. To work around this, you may be able to create a partition with DOS and FDISK and then start the installation again. You may also create a partition that is smaller than 1 GB in size during the Text-mode portion of Setup. This allows the installation process to continue.
  1. Upgrade the system BIOS.
  2. Upgrade the NetRAID firmware.
  3. Restart your computer to continue Setup.
  4. Create a Partition in DOS fdisk, format FAT and then convert it (see below)
If your Upgrading to Win2000 read THIS Acticle first, Upgrading Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 fails if HP Navigator's Automated NOS Installation for NT 4.0 was performed.

Here is another work around posted by a user for this and for the 8GB partition limit
Step one; Load newest BIOS and firware just be safe
Step two; Load the WinNT 4.0 Server on a 2 Gig Fat Partion.
Step three; Delete the I386 Dir made on C: drive where the WinNT was and drop the Pagefile from 1500 to 256 to make room for W2kAS
Step four; Start a four disk floppy install W2kAS on same drive as WinNT but under new Dir.
Step five; Reboot into W2kAS, then delete the WinNT 4.0 Server and edit the boot.ini. On top section remove any WinNT boot selections
Step six; Issue a Start/Run, type cmd then at command prompt typed c:/fs/ntfs to convert the 2Gig FAT to NTFS W2kAS Version 5 after reboot. Reboot.
Step seven; After convert go to Snapin tool Disk Manager. take the Disk 0 on the NetRAID D4943A that the 2 Gig Partition for, now, W2kAS, select the 8m partition for HP Partition tools and free space over 40Gigs and bond them to the C: of the W2kAS as one drive as in NTFS..

Win 2000 Drivers for NetRAID-1 (D4992A) or NetRAID (D4943A)

Simple put the NetRAID drivers are universal. You may use the driver for HP NetRAID-3Si, NetRAID-1Si and integrated NetRAID (Windows 2000 Standard NetRAIDriver) 2.66 18-Oct-01 English drv_w2k_nr_std_266.exe [0.17 MB] for the NetRAID-1 (D4992A) or NetRAID (D4943A). But there are other options.

Users have reported flashing there NetRAID and NetRAID-1 cards with the Original Manufacturer's Firmware and receive great results. The AMI MegaRAID Enterprise 1200(428) Firmware  uf82-166.zip 6/6/2000 Release Upgrade for the the AMI version of the NetRAID and NetRAID-1, with accompanying  readme.txt ,can provide the user with the addition of FPM , LVD and built in Win2000 Support. Simply Download the Firmware for the AMI MegaRAID Ultra 428 (basically the same card as the Netraid-1) and flash the Disk Array Controller Netraid. Loaded Win2000 operating system by using the 4 boot disks, you do not have to supply a single driver. Windows 2000 Svr automatically installs the drivers for the HP NetRAID card using AMI MegaRAID drivers that are bundled with the O.S..