I bought a Dell PE 2950 III off ebay that came with 2008 eval installed. I installed 2012 R2 on it and used it to do some live migrations to and from my Dell T420. While the VM's were on the 2950 I upgraded some firmware on the T420 and also upgraded it to R2. I then live migrated the VM's from the 2950 back to the T420. All is well with the T420 and its guest VM's.
So, I had a perfectly good working 2950 with Server 2012 R2 installed. Then I decided I wanted to get rid of the RAID 5 array and turn it into a RAID 10 array. Now I can't install 2012 R2 on this computer! Nope, no backup of my 2012 R2 install. I thought there was nothing on there I needed.
I've tried many things. I first tried the Server Management Tools and Documentation disc ver. 7.30 and from it's list of OS's I chose 2012 since there was no selection for R2 available. Install was not successful (see error code below). I later found Dell documentation saying the 7.30 disc was not compatible with 2012 R2. So I then try the 7.10 SMTD and install 2008 R2 SP1 successfully. So I am back to what arrived in the box from ebay. I try both an in-place upgrade to 2012 R2 and to format C: and install but I always get the same error: "Windows cannot install required files. The file may be corrupt or missing. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code: 0x80070570" - It's not a bad install disc, have burned 3 from 2 different burners and they all behave the same.
If I format the array so there are NO partitions and boot from the 2012 R2 disc it cannot find any fixed disks. I downloaded the PERC 6/i x64 drivers but the installer wouldn't accept them.
I've googled this stuff and searched these forums 6 ways to Sunday and I still can't get 2012 R2 to install on this server. And NOW the stupid Dell site won't let me download anything for the 2950!!! Going on 2 days now dell's website tells me "We are sorry....We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. I've tried it on multiple computers/browsers/DNS, even on my phone and I can't get access to any of those downloads for the 2950. I will try accessing the website from home tonight.
Thank you all for any help you can offer!