48 hours later still no success PLEASE HELP!!

[kurly]

Hi everyone;

I'm running a 2U rack mountable server from intel
The boards model number is SE7501WV2
running (6) 72 gig scsi hard drives (same make and model for all)
4 gigs of crucial ddr1 266
2 xeon 2.66 proccessors

I've put well over 48 hours in to this project and now it's time to ask for some help. After eliminating many other problems including a faulty cd rom, bad partitioning, and cd rom drivers, i'm still not getting anywhere.
yesterday i reformatted 3 of the six harddrives and put them in a RAID 0 array and all seemed fine. i Fdisked them (now that's old school) and reformatted them again after partitioning (might i add this took almost 12 hours to complete).
woke up this morning and i started an xp install (this isn't the operating system i wish to install, but it's the easiest so i went with it) setup started which is further than i'e gotten so far and i was excited.....until. I got an error "file \winnt40\adpu320.sys caused an unexpected error (4096) at line 2113 in d:\nt\base\boot\setup\oemdisk.c"
Now i tried to use the scsi drivers i downoaded from adaptec and windows said it had more up to date drivers than my floppy so i went with windows (i got the above mentioned error) Then i said screw windows and went with the drivers on the floppy and received the same error. it says after the error to press any key to continue which always results in my system restarting.
can anyone help? thanks in advance.

 

[gtvr]

Is it a hardware RAID array?

Can you install the OS on a single disk?

 

[kurly]

i beleive it's just a software utility i set up the raid with. I have tried to install to a single hard drive and still no success. but i pulled the raid card and now my scsi's plugged directly in the motherboard to a back board with six hotswappable slots.

thanks for posting

 

[kurly]

Really has nobody come accross this problem before. i'm at my wits end here any help would be appreciated

 

[sminlal]

XP is very old and it doesn't include the drivers for a lot of post-2003 hardware. And Adaptec SCSI drivers aren't going to do you any good for RAID (unless your system is using an Adaptec RAID host adapter).

You might try a copy of Windows 7 since it's a lot more current in terms of driver support.

 

[kurly]

thank you sminlal for your reply but i have tried windows 98 right through to windows 7 and everything in between the closest i got was server 2003 started to install (very slowly) but it froze up at 66% of copying system files. i have yet to make it to the windows gui.

 

[sminlal]

Do you have a diagnostics disk for the server? It might be worth running tests on the memory and disks just to make sure you don't have a hardware issue that's causing the problem.

 

[kurly]

i don't have one.but when i got this server it was used, and booted up to windows server 2003 no problems. That indicated to me it was not a hardware issue but maybe and old raid setup was conflicting or something along that lines. i've reformatted and partitioned since then and still no luck. could the hardware be bad but still boot up windows?

 

[rand_79]

are you trying to install windows to a raid array?

usually you have a small boot drive be it ide or sata /scsi whatever

then a raid array for data.

try removing everything possible
down to 2gig of ram and 1 hdd non raided and see if windows installs.