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My day started well upacking the nice shiny boxes we've bought with 3ware RAID cards. These servers are going into a rack where they will work until they die so we thought we'd be clever and buy them without CD-ROM or floppy and instead buy a USB CD-ROM drive and just plug it in on the odd occasion we need to use it. I install Debian, everything fine, RAID hardware detected, everything groovy. I install Windows 2003 (for a client I hasten to add) and my troubles start. So it took ten minutes to load everything it needed from the CD just to say it was ready to start installing. (I'd like to point out Debian was up and downloading packages over the net at this point). Windows says we found no hard drives. No what you mean is that due to all the other crap you have on the CD the engineers (I use the term loosely) didn't see fit to put any standard RAID drivers on the CD. So I reboot a few times trying to watch the screen for the 2 nanosecond chance you get to say "Add third party raid drivers". I then wait ten minutes for windows to load all its crap and ask me where the third party raid drivers are. There the fun begins. Can I put a CD in with them on ? No Can I grab them via FTP on a DHCP network card ? No Can I stick them on a USB flash stick ? No I have to have them on a floppy. I mean for heaven's sake, in this day and age when we have so many other ways I have to use a technology that went out with the ark. Of course I have no floppy with them on. I'm not even sure I have a floppy disk in the office. So now I have to take the lid off my new box and plug in a floppy drive I cannibalised from an old 386 I dug out from my attic. Just to install the drivers so a commercial and up to date operating system can see the disks that are on a mainstream RAID card. I mean how is this sane ? *sigh*
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