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DELL Precision 690 & Windows 7 + Perc 5/Si RAID doesn't boot anymore due to incorrect Perc driver installed
I have a fresh Windows 7 64bit install on my DELL Precision 690 on a PERC 5/si controller with raid 1 mirrored disks.
It was running fine for about a month but the entire time it would NOT detect either of my CD or DVD drives connected to the system.
Finally I got sick of it so I went to try to find driver updates for my DELL. I managed to update the bios to the latest version without anything changing - still no CD nor DVD would pop up.
I then realized that my PERC 5si seemingly didn't exist in my Device manager and I did have a yellow question mark PCI device hanging out in my device manager. So I downloaded the 64bit Windows Vista Perc 5/Si integrated controller driver and tried updating my yellow question mark with it :(
Now my system won't boot. The problem is - Windows refuses to boot either SAFE MODE option probably due to that I have a raid? Last known good configuration doesn't work and neither does "system restore". Windows 7 automatic startup repair doesn't manage to do anything.
Chosing "command prompt" option from the advanced repair menu actually lets me see the C: drive. My question is now - does anyone know WHAT file I could possibly edit or replace on C:\ that would enable me to boot correctly again?
detroitologist
3 Posts
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Posted April 8th, 2010 12:00
I had no problems installing Windows 7. Windows installed all the drivers necessary including the PERC 5/si and SAS drive. The ethernet card had no drivers compatible with Windows 7 but I replaced that PCI card with wireless. I have to figure out if I can get Windows to boot automatically without having to press F1. I added a SATA drive as well for storage but when I am transferring files from my digital camera the drive sometimes goes offline and is not available in my devices. Later it reappears. A few bugs to work out is not that bad.
on3eighteen
8 Posts
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Posted July 25th, 2011 12:00
Does whomever have the PERC 5/i installed in a Precision 690 have a battery attached to the card? I *believe* that the only way to get write-caching to work is to have a battery attached to the card. Otherwise, like the built-in SAS 5/ir controller which doesn't have a battery, the write performance is horribly slow by almost a factor of 10x.
kajbjo
4 Posts
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Posted December 28th, 2009 23:00
Guess what? I solved it myself - yay!
I just checked what was in the "lastgood" folder under windows. There I found the systmem32/drivers directory with 1 sys file in it. I copied that file to the c:\windows\system32\drivers folder and rebooted.
Tadaaa... the system came up. Isn't it weird that "LAST KNOWN GOOD CONFIGURATION" didn't work then considering?