HP Microserver Gen8 Setup Help

[MoonPig]

Hey,

I recently bought one of these when they were on the £80 Cashback offer.

After realising you have to use the "Intelligent Provisioning" to install and OS, I finally got Windows Server 2012 R2 installed and it running smooth. I then copied an episode of Nitro Circus I have over, installed Plex Media Server and with hardly any messing around had it streaming to every computer in my house, brilliant.

I then decided it's time to start moving my HDDs over so all my media was available. That's where the issues started. I rebooted with 3x 2TB in (waiting on my 4th 2TB to be returned from Seagate, should be today) and they weren't to be seen in Windows (Explorer and Disk Management showed nothing). I assumed this was down to the HDD configuration in BIOS as I was messing around with it when I couldn't get my SSD (Installed in the ODD bay with a homemade FDD-SATA cable, works 100%). BIOS was set to RAID, so I changed it to Legacy Support and booted again, BIOS saw all 4 drives (SSD + 3x HDD) but hung after all the HP checks with this message:

http://img.techpowerup.org/150707/Untitled.jpg

I then decided to re-install Windows in AHCI mode and see if they'll be seen then, this time using Windows 8.1 instead just for the speed. Both AHCI and Legacy Support gave the same error after HP's checks.

Now, i'm assuming this is down to me having data on the drives? One of the 2TB drives is pretty much full, the others are over half full. All the way through this process i've been putting the drives back into my computer to make sure everything is fine, they show in that every time.

My replacement 2TB from Seagate arrived this morning and I popped it straight in (assuming it'd be either unformatted or formatted with no data on it) and i'm still getting the exact same message. If I take out the drive, leaving only my SSD in, it boots every time.

Any idea why i'm getting this message?

 

[blobster21]

I'd say one of your 2TB HDDs took the lead in your boot sequence, and since it has no bootable partition / mbr, it fails rights after the POST.

First thing to check is to make sure your SSD has the highest priority in your boot sequence.


edit : the other thing is you most probably installed 2012R2 when the controller was set in RAID mode, but now you switched to legacy support, the boot manager written on the SSD can no longer find its way home.

If you still want to run your server on legacy mode, your will most probably have to reinstall your OS upon it.

 

[MoonPig]

With the HP Bios on this, I don't think you can actually set an order - simply just HDD, CD-ROM, USB, NIC etc.

I had it on HDD and when it failed to boot with the HDDs in I changed it to CD-ROW thinking i'm using that SATA port so maybe it's programmed like that, still didn't work - same message.

I've looked for that option multiple times, i'll get some screenshots now.

Edit:

Managed to get it to boot with a spare 160GB HDD along side the Intel SSD as OS. Can't check with my 2TBs at the moment as i'm copying data across them on my computer. Soon as I can, I will and update this thread.