I've got a 2008R2 server I am wanting to upgrade. The only nonstandard hardware without a built-in driver is the Adaptec 1430SA HostRAID controller that it boots from. For this, I have to use the drivers for Windows 7/2008R2 downloaded from Adaptec's website. The only thing Adaptec would tell me is "end of life, not supported, Win7 drivers should work, no new drivers coming, you can pay us money if you want to talk more about it" I have already gone through a testing process of disconnecting the production drives and installing 2012 Server on a new set, providing the RAID driver to setup when it declares it can't find any drives. This works fine and I indeed end up with a running server. Problem is, I need to upgrade. I have already attempted this. It goes all the way through the install, reboots, detects devices, reboots again, and says the upgrade failed. Then it backs it all out and I am back where I started and the server is still running 2008R2. I suspect it is at some point deciding that the Adaptec drivers don't work. Several ideas came to mind: - If I could figure out a way to embed the required drivers into the install image maybe it could succeed at an upgrade. - Is there a way to make it load a driver from external media during the upgrade? - Is there a log file(s) stored somewhere after an unsuccessful upgrade that might give me more information about why it failed? - Worst case, I would have to backup all my data and make a list of all configurations and installed software (good luck!) and then blow the whole thing away and install clean. Any other ideas or suggestions would be welcome.
The setup log files are in %systemroot%\panther. Check setupact.log, it should contain information about all the steps performed, and any errors. Not sure about upgrade installs, but it might be possible to specify custom driver paths with an unattend file.
Thanks; always wondered what panther was about. I didn't find what you mentioned, except the logs of when the current version was installed successfully a year or more ago. However I did a search of the entire C: for *.log and started reading the ones modified near the time of the upgrade. All I have found so far is that it seems like it doesn't like something about the drivers for the Realtek gigabit adapter on my mainboard. Perhaps I will try again tonight, delete all the network drivers first then try to run the upgrade.
Oh, I see; the log file path is different for upgrade installs then. Odd that it would fail the install because of the NIC. Since it's on-board you could try disabling it in BIOS before running the upgrade.
Yay! I am successful. It was in fact the Realtek network adapter. I uninstalled the drivers completely, removed the hardware then disabled the adapter in BIOS. I also previously had to uninstall the drivers for my two Intel gigabit cards and break the teaming, leaving only one enabled. Setup detected Intel and told me to do it, but it didn't have a clue about Realtek. So I am up and running, all the Hyper-V machines migrated properly (had to rerun the integration components on the older ones) the only other thing was the driver for my HP printer was nonfunctional, had to find a Win-8 compatible one at hp and install it. Ran windows update, it installed the huge cumulative one, survived the reboot. Next step, see if I can break it by re-enabling the Realtek adapter, and re-enabling teaming on my Intel adapters.