Koldov Posted August 18, 2015 Posted August 18, 2015 Hi All, Trying to upgrade my server to 2012R2 and not having much luck! Started with a 2008 server (non R2) and did the upgrade to 2008R2 without any hassle. 2012R2 won't install though and just gives an unhelpful message... ...after getting most of the way through the install! The server is a DELL PowerEdge T610 and from what I can see is on the approved list. I've upgraded the BIOS and the PERC 6/i firmware, not sure what else might be causing it to fail. Kol.
IanT Posted August 18, 2015 Posted August 18, 2015 Why are you doing a In-Place Upgrade and not a clean install?
3s-gtech Posted August 18, 2015 Posted August 18, 2015 (edited) Your current OS install is 64 bit isn't it? Would have to be to take 2008 R2 in the first place. My suspicions would lie with an incompatible driver - network or more likely RAID. See if you can update these first. Edited August 18, 2015 by 3s-gtech 1
featured_spectre Posted August 18, 2015 Posted August 18, 2015 Why are you doing a In-Place Upgrade and not a clean install? Depends on the inhouse software used. I've come across software that was developed for a particular company, wouldn't run on a clean install of Server 2012 but worked when we did an upgrade of 2008R2 to 2012...sounds daft but happens more often than people care to think with legacy bespoke software.
IanT Posted August 18, 2015 Posted August 18, 2015 Depends on the inhouse software used. I've come across software that was developed for a particular company, wouldn't run on a clean install of Server 2012 but worked when we did an upgrade of 2008R2 to 2012...sounds daft but happens more often than people care to think with legacy bespoke software. I've seen that before, I try to avoid an In-Place upgrade at all times.
Blue_Cookeh Posted August 21, 2015 Posted August 21, 2015 Have you checked the event log? There may be some clues in there. Don't worry about it, I did in-place upgrades on both our primary DC, and two Hyper-V hosts no problem (although they don't run anything else on them). 1
IanT Posted August 21, 2015 Posted August 21, 2015 (edited) Have you checked the event log? There may be some clues in there. Don't worry about it, I did in-place upgrades on both our primary DC, and two Hyper-V hosts no problem (although they don't run anything else on them). I see you quickly amended your post from "Dont worry about these people" - slightly rude. RE: In-Place Upgrade on a DC, you were brave! Edited August 21, 2015 by IanT
Koldov Posted August 24, 2015 Author Posted August 24, 2015 (edited) Ok all done after a slight palava! Thanks for those who posted helpful posts! To summarise after a lot of Gooooogling, I came across a few posts suggesting an incompatible graphics chip driver (Matrox G200ew) and there appears to only be a Server 2012 driver about (via both Matrox and DELL) even though their site says the card is compatible with R2, maybe the driver works for both. However I could not install this driver before the upgrade as it version checks and did not like 2008R2 as it seems there is a definite shift between 2008 and 2012, other drivers (as suggested) could possibly have given me the same issue too and I'm thinking it is like an XP -> 7 thing where sometimes you could be lucky if it was only reading an .inf, but mostly the difference is vast and if it came with other .dlls and stuff the installer wouldn't be able to put it in the right place. That left me with a slight conundrum as it was an in-place upgrade I couldn't 'inject' the drivers during the install... Then I thought to hell with it! Maybe, if there is a 2012 driver I'd just upgrade to that and leave it there.... and it worked! I did decompress the DELL 2012 driver and put the contents in WINDOWS/DRIVERS and a few other places, maybe this helped maybe it didn't, but 2012 installed a generic driver so I installed the DELL one after the upgrade. I left it at that for a few days, going through and installing any updates and getting used to the system/interface and tracking down some errors via event viewer. Just left me wondering why I could upgrade to 2012 but not R2... There were only a few minor errors and if anything it seemed to have decreased slightly from the 2008 server, however one thing was nagging me and I sorted it from here *(will edit and update source when I remember where I found it)* ... Something about Server Manager showing red for Manageability and specifically 'Online - Data retrieval failures occured' and being unable to read a log file somewhere... Anyway, all being good I should have left it there but... I cracked one evening while I was remotely checking through the server after remembering that I had left the USB stick in, with the 2012R2 install folder on it.... Now I have a 2012R2 server running just fine, fingers crossed it stays that way and nothing from the old installs comes back to bite me in the a$$! So, three upgrades 2008 (original) -> 2008R2 -> 2012 -> 2012R2 and no real major problems I'm glad to say! Yes, this is a DC, print server, file server, DNS server etc... I'm not sure if it wasn't a mixture of laziness and a slight lack of understanding re: the process of killing a server with all these roles, backing up, static i.p.'s, shares, printer drivers, that made me want to upgrade and although I know that in best practise I should have done a fresh install, but there were enough people with good experiences of upgrades to make me try it (and if the worst came to the worst and it completely failed I would have had to bite the bullet and done that anyway). Kol. Edited August 24, 2015 by Koldov 1
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