Archive for December, 2009

Fixing ‘Windows Could not determine if this computer contains a valid system volume’ when installing Windows 2008

By | December 31, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I was trying to install Windows Server 2008 Standard x64 on one of our servers, intended to be an internal SQL database server.
It’s equipped with a 3Ware 9650SE 8LPML RAID controller. It has 8x 250gb hard drives.
I’d set up 2 units:

  • RAID 0 (Stripe) – For the OS (2 drives)
  • RAID 10 (6 drives)

I downloaded the drivers from the 3Ware website, and put them on a USB flash drive.
I should point out at this point, that the download is circa 50mb – the actual drivers are only about 150kb… the rest is a .exe file used for upgrading drivers on an existing system.

You then go through the setup screens, and clicked Load Drivers where you are supposed to select a drive to install on. It finds the USB drive, select the drive… all seems ok so far.

Upon selecting the smaller of the 2 units (my RAID 0 stripe) and pressing next, I got a screen saying:

Windows Could not determine if this computer contains a valid system volume

Uh oh!

After much Googling, I found the problem was in the BIOS – and that the USB drive should be de-selected as a boot device.

I restarted, pressed F2 to get into the BIOS setting, and de-activated the USB drive.

However – this did not work! I still had the same error!

Here are the steps that I used to finally get it to work:

  1. Put driver files on USB floppy drive (not sure if this is significant, but it worked for me)
    Remember, the actual driver files are < 200kb – it’s just the EXE file that’s large
  2. Restart machine, leaving USB (floppy) plugged in
  3. Enter BIOS setup – Boot sequence.
  4. Deactivate USB  from the Boot sequence
  5. Make the 3ware RAID controller #1 in the sequence
  6. Save & Exit
  7. Enter Windows 2008 setup again, this time, it should work

I think the key is point #5 – You MUST make the RAID controller the first in the boot sequence.

What effect using the floppy drive had, I’m unsure. Probably nothing.

Ass-Kissing Blog Comment Spam

By | December 28, 2009 | Uncategorized | No comments

Recently, I have been receiving a large amount of a different kind of comment spam on my WordPress blog.

In an effort to get around the Akismet spam protection, they have created several variations of the same kind of poor English, brown nosing comments… that effectively mean nothing.

The whole point of them, is to allow their URL to be posted in the “Website” field of the comment.

I recently had one on this post, to which I approved the comment, and later realised it was actually spam – so simply edited the comment, removed the URL, and left a reply underneath.

Here are the kind of comments (complete with spelling errors and bad English)

I’ll edit this post when I come across some more…

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