I’m an intern for a health care facility in their IT department. As part of the hands on learning experience i’ve been tasked with setting up one of the new servers. We have 3 windows server 2003 discs. One basic, one with SP1 slipstreamed, and one with SP2 slipstreamed. Now the problem is none of these are based off of R2. They’re all original release.
The problem stems from the hardware of the server it’s self. It’s a Power Edge 2900 from Dell. It’s using the PERC 6 raid controller card that was originally designed for Windows Server 2008 and then made backwards compatible for Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2.
Dell had me try using their System Build Updates Utility for the install trying each of our different disks. With and without OpenManage being part of the install process. They had me try each of the disks stand alone using raid drivers from a floppy disk for the install and each time it blue screened when it tried to boot to windows to complete the install.
Dell gave us a list of 3 options. We could downgrade to a PERC 5 controller which wasn’t listed as compatible for our older discs so it’s not even a guaranteed fix. We could buy a retail version of windows server 2003 R2 SP2. Or we could upgrade to windows server 2008.
I was informed none of those options were suitable at the moment. And was told to see if I could find a work around. After trying a few things such as attempting to download the cd images and use our volume license without success i’ve run out of ideas.
So if anyone knows of a viable work around to help me get this server up and running it’d be much appreciated.
