Ok, what I have at my hands is something that is really driving me mad. I bought a Acer M5620 workstation to home that contained pre-installed Vista Home Premium OS. As I have the right to install 2003 Server Standard I chose to reinstall the machine with the latter one. Anyhow, I chose to quickly setup RIS to my home environment. As this is basically just a matter of creating new image for Aspire M5620 and downloading drivers I was suspecting rather easy-going night. And how wrong was I..

I used the newest Intel Storage Manager driver available from Intel to build the TEXTMODE (non-pnp) directory, then modified the .SIF file and booted with PXE. However, the CIW just keeps saying "cannot detect hard disk drives".

I know the M5620 contains an Intel G33 chipset with ICH9R mass storage controller, and this has been defined in the .SIF file as well. I chose this from the TXTSETUP.OEM as the storage controller:



I think it should be working both with ICH8R and ICH9R controllers, but it doesn't. Currently my machine only has one SATA drive attached to the port number 1, while BIOS is claiming the SATA mode to be RAID. For some reason I cannot change that SATA mode setting onto ACHI as the value is just grayed out.

Anyway, I'm a bit clueless here so if any of you guys come up with something I would definitely appreciate I'm starting to suspect that I have to actually create RAID array for the CIW to pick up the disk or something.

I think my problem was that [massStorageDrivers] section got over-looked because [unattended] was missing




Without this it seems that OemPnPDriversPath=<something> gets overlooked as well.

Nice to learn all the time!