Windows 2003 ADVANCED server?

Published by sbostedor on October 16th, 2007 - in Ubuntu, windows

I have an HP xw8400 workstation in my office that I’m attempting to make into a host for virtual machines.

I can install the 64 bit Ubuntu Fiesty on it with no problems and it operates great as a VMWare host. I wanted to test performance differences so I decided to install Windows 2003 64bit server on it.

I am greeted with the pictured stop error in the early stages of Windows 2003 setup. I thought that it was just because it was not able to see the SATA controller so I downloaded a driver, put it on a floppy, hung a floppy drive off the workstation, and ran setup with the F6 option.

No dice. It still crashes the same. How is it that Windows 2003 R2 can still not install to a computer with SATA drives and new hardware while the open source Ubuntu can?

Things are looking very sad for Microsoft.

3 Comments »

Steve

I accidentally deleted this comment:

drea517 has left a new comment on your post “Windows 2003 ADVANCED server?”:

Your problem has nothing to do with SATA drivers or Microsoft – don’t blame Microsoft because you do not understand fully what you are doing. The problem is that your CD-Rom is also SATA, this cannot work because the install disc will read that device as a HDD. You will need to disconnect the SATA Optical drive and use an IDE drive – simple as that!
Steve

Drea517,

Please do not insult my intelligence or expertise. If you’d like to be helpful, please post suggestions. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

The CDROM drive in the server is actually IDE and not SATA.

You say not to blame Microsoft but even if the drive was SATA and your reason were correct, it still stands that Windows would halt the install while Ubuntu would carry it out without a problem.

With Ubuntu, you don’t NEED an IDE CDROM drive to install the OS. That’s a shortfall of Windows.
Jason

Did you ever get this issue resolved? I’ve been struggling with the exact same thing. Do you think this model simply does not support Windows 2003? In fact, it does not ship with that OS as an option, but I can’t find ANYWHERE that it’s strictly not supported.

Geek Zing