Installing a new server with Windows Server 2008 to a blank hard drive and during the install process it fails at the disk format stage with

“Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation”

There is a Microsoft KB article KB927520 about this and I figured that the obvious issue was that the drivers for the main board SATA controller did not match with the MS supplied drivers.

There are a couple of issues with this:

• the suggested solution to download/update the drivers cannot be undertaken on a bare metal system, particularly when the network card is yet to be enabled to allow for communication
• the Intel mainboard came with a special self-booting driver and management disk, but it failed to read the DVD because it could not recognise its own controller until the drivers were available, a real catch-22

So having tried a number of options, I opted to grab one of our 2003 Server install disks just to verify that there was no actual hardware issue. Having successfully installed Windows Server 2003 I then loaded the Intel CD to do the BIOS and system updates.

Once that was loaded I checked the disk via the Disk Manager utility and converted it to Dynamic, as I would be doing a software mirror later and then I loaded the Windows Server 2008 disk to try again.

Guess what, it all works like there was never an issue. Upgrade option worked a treat.

As a side issue I was mildly peeved to have a new Feb 2010 server delivered with a new motherboard that required patches and updates that were dated September 2008 which implies that the last time Intel did any on board updates was around 3 years ago!