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I Killed My Windows 2003 Server … and Was Happy!
By Howard Young | August 4, 2007
I managed to kill my Windows 2003 server the other day. It happened when I was upgrading it to Service Pack #2 and it ran out of disk space and couldn’t revert back to the previous version.
You would think that 1.7G is plenty of space to upgrade, but no….
The server was an old Dell 6300 with 4 Pentium II running at a lighting speed of 450 MHz. When it was purchased about five or six years ago, it was an extremely powerful server. And it still is powerful for driving I/O to the Firmware I’m testing.
Since it’s used for testing, it was no big loss. Just the time to reinstall 2003. I plopped in the Enterprise edition and it wouldn’t boot off the CD. I checked the BIOS and alas no “Boot From CD First” configuration. It can boot off a 3 1/2″ floppy.
So I go about trying to create a bootable floppy with 2003 on it. Usually, the Windows OS CD has a utility to create 2003 boot disks so you can install it initially from a floppy. But not on 2003.
There is a way to create a 2003 boot floppy, install a loader and SCSI driver so that you can read the CD after you boot from floppy. So I went through all the trouble to create the disk, plopped in the CD again and reboot.
This time the Dell sees the CD and starts booting off it. The only different I did this time was put the latches down over the CD ROM. Duh. The CD ROM is mounted vertical in the server instead of horizontal as in the majority of all computers. Doh! What a time killer.
Any way I got the OS reinstalled and I’m back in business.
Topics: Computers Suck, Hardware |