PowerEdge 2800- driver issue, no drive found while attempting startup disk

It sucks not having someone to bounce ideas off and can take hours to finally find the golden ticket.

That's why we're here :)

Get the driver from here (32-bit):
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=8KN93&fileId=2731108926&osCode=WNET&productCode=poweredge-2800&languageCode=EN&categoryId=SR

You must use the "Hard Drive" version of the driver. It is a self-extracting EXE, so you run it on a Windows system to extract the files before use. You can put those extracted files on a floppy or use them with nLite.

Use nLiteOS.com. I don't know how we ever lived with floppies.

Thanks for the support :)  I was just able to get to this today and went with the floppy option for the above linked file.  I pressed F6 to load mass storage/RAID drivers. When prompted to insert a floppy I did that.  I got a message that the driver in Windows is newer.  I chose to use the driver on the disk.  Blue screen.  Restarted and pressed f6 during startup.  Inserted the floppy drive when prompted but this time I chose to stick with the newer driver version in the OS.  Now it says unable to load support for the mass storage devices you specified.  Currently setup will load support for the following mass storage devices:

I'm thinking I'll try again with the floppies I made from the other driver downloads.  Any more suggestions?

So this morning I'll make a new nLite disk but I have two questions.  The server has the Enterprise Edition installed but I don't have my original disk and the only thing I could find was standard Server2003 to download.  Should this work alright just to use to get into system repair?  It does seem to be booting find except for this driver issue. Secondly, as I make the nLIte disk many of the drivers say textmode.  Is this alright?

Also- I figured it couldn't hurt to install more drivers than needed (they are all listed for this service tag). My thought is it will just not use any that it has something more suitable for?  I have:

PERC 4/DC RAID Controller Driver

PERC 4/Di Raid On Motherboard Driver

PERC 4/SC RAID Controller Driver

PERC 4e/DC RAID COntroller Driver

4e/Di RAID COntroller Driver

4e/Si RAID Controller Driver

Dell SAS 5c and SAS 6x Controller Driver x64

Dell PERC RAID Products for Windows 2003 (x86)

You can't use it for a Repair Install, but you can use it for generic Recovery Console commands.

Yes, when adding drivers on nLite, use Multiple Drivers, select all listed drivers, and TextMode.

Thank you for the thoughtful input on my dilemma.

Arggghh. Still struggling with this.  I have gotten nowhere with nLite and slipping the drivers into the install disk.  I still get the same no drives found.  So I've tried another angle and need help understanding how RAID works a bit.

We have three drives in this server.  They are all 36GB.  I understand that RAID allows that to be utilized as one space and partitioned however desired.  Currently this storage was partitioned into two drives.  One is about 36GB (this is the OS drive) and the remainder (70-75GB from memory) is for data.  We've been having trouble before this with the OS drive running out of room (makes sense, I would have made it larger if I had done this myself).  There is plenty of room on the data area to move some of it to the OS space for more wiggle room.  However, Server 2003 did not have options for shrinking/growing a volume.

This morning I went into Control M to take a look at the drives and ensure they are active and online.  The first one listed under RAID Ch-0, ID 0 says FAILED.  I'm assuming this means the drive has died.  However, when I boot the system it does go through the initial startup stuff (during the black screen info it does list a degraded drive) and gets a Windows Server 2003 splash screen and then goes to a light gray screen with the mouse cursor which I can move around.  I don't get a control/alt/delete login though.  I'm assuming this is due to my stupid decision to replace lsass.exe with a copy from a Windows 7 machine since I didn't have an OS disk for Server 2003. So I guess these would be my questions:

Is this drive actually dead or just failing but still operational for now or what? I'm confused by the almost successful boot.

Does RAID work to take over if one drive fails and this is why it is still able to boot up?

I was thinking I could take the drives out and slave them to get the data I'm looking for but they have something other than the standard SCSI jack I was expecting.  Is this doable if I get the correct cable?

Thanks again for helping me out.

Hello Again-  My brain knew they were SCSI but it was expecting a SATA connection.  I'm just not thinking.  Anyway, it sounds like the manner in which the data is dispersed across SCSI drives means I probably can't just remove them.  So I'm back to getting the right drivers to get this thing to boot up.  Perhaps the issue is that the OS disk I have is Server 2003 and not Server 2003 Enterprise Edition?  I just cannot find that anywhere :(

3 drives are only redundant if it's RAID-5.  If it's RAID-0 / JBOD then you have lost data and you have much more serious problems on your hands.

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Getting into a system that's down which uses a RAID controller can be quite difficult.

Generally you need to boot a full Windows OS alongside it to access the NTFS partition, which is why people are suggesting nLite, which is based on Windows XP. The PE2800 is old enough that nLite probably already includes a driver for it by default.

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Do you have access to anything newer, such as Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7, Windows 8, etc? (You can download a 180-day trial of the 2008 R2 DVD, below.)

When you boot with these and you get to the Windows setup/install screen, you can usually press Alt-F10 and a command prompt will open. 

Though you may have another problem trying this, as I believe the PE2800 has only a CD drive, not a DVD drive. I do not remember if the PE2800 supports USB booting.

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Network PXE booting of a PE2800 using WinPE 3.0 via Windows Deployment Services running on Server 2008 R2 is possible, but that's only if you have another computer where you can temporarily install the Server 2008 R2 180-day trial. And you will have to wade into learning how to add the WDS role and generating the WinPE 3.0 boot image from the 2008 R2 download, and setting the DHCP options so the down machine can see it and boot from it. (If you're gonna be a network admin, it's useful to learn all this anyway.)

www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx

This, might I add, is probably what I'd call "taking heroic measures", to rescue a Server 2003 box.

Also, Server 2003 32-bit and Windows XP 32-bit are of the same OS generation. In many cases, files from XP MAY be compatible with server 2003.  

Windows 7 is of a newer generation, generally the same as Server 2008 / 2008 R2.

Windows 8 is newer yet, alongside Server 2012.

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Due to Windows Updates however, there are many possible versions of a system file, and there's no way to guess which one you should be using.

It is possible though that it already exists on the system due to Windows File Protection, hidden in a backup directory in the Windows directory.

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If the server is in such bad shape, you should not continue to use it. Backup the actual important data on it, replace the bad drives in the RAID array and rebuild the array, reformat, and reinstall the operating system.

Speaking of backups, you have been occasionally backing up this Server 2003 box, right? Maybe backing up once a week, or once a day?

Are the backups reliable? Have you tried restoring any backups to alternate storage, to see if they actually work?