THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

Notice: HP ProLiant G5 Servers - Installing the Embedded SATA RAID Controller Driver During an Installation of Windows Server 2008, Windows Small Business Server 2008, or Windows Essential Server 2008 - c01660474 - HP Business Support Center:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01660474

When building a server ... and especially if you are reusing hardware and well.. being ..cheap about it... one thing to check to see if the hardware you are trying to install on has a Server 2008 64bit driver.  Even on the newer low cost hardware that is meant to be used in the low end marketplace, you get to that very first screen where the system has booted up, it goes to find a harddrive to install to and....

nothing...

And without that driver in the right spot right there for that OS to see that embedded raid to then in turn see the drive, you go no where really fast.  The good news is that in this era you no longer have to find floppy disks and feed it to the server, you can now use cdroms or usb flash drives.  But the bottom line is still, you MUST have a driver for that hardware that the drives hang off of, otherwise that Windows Server 2008/SBS 2008/EBS 2008 will not see that system. 

This is why for the SBS 2008 era, the Win2k8 era, heck the Windows 7 era, your best experience will still be with new hardware that has the drivers tailored for that OS.

More posts here -- Business support forums - Works for me: ML110 G5, MS Windows Server 2008 Standard x64, and Embedded SATA RAID drivers:
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?prodSeriesId=3580609&prodTypeId=15351&threadId=1309171&admit=109447626+1246730114966+28353475

(as always, this is only an on premises problem, cloud computing never ever has any issues.)

(Yeah I know ... totally cheap shot, but I couldn't resist)