Did he make this look like hard work?

[Dos_Box]

I watched this recently, a guy installing Windows Server 2000 on a 2001 Compaq server, as many of us did back in the day.
I'm sure it was never this much of a faff, but much of this is due to the issue of not being able to get the RAID drivers to work correctly during setup (and all of he other issues he has).
I'm not knocking him, as this must seem like black magic these days, but I'm sure we used to get around these problems a lot quicker than this.
Or that all our floppies used to work  

 

 

[3s-gtech]

It could be a pig of a job. I'm building a 'new' server today, and sticking 2025 on it is not proving to be easy or quick...I'm now trying via 2022 and that involved having no video output on boot.

[Fazza]

There's a reason why Compaq had SmartStart CDs - you booted from the Compaq SmartStart CD and then selected which OS you wanted to install and then inserted the OS CD and it would magically install the OS along with the Drivers etc. from the SmartStart CD (usually) without any issues.

[MrEprise]

Dell used to have something similar. When it worked, it was pretty much set and forget.

[Dos_Box]

20 minutes ago, MrEprise said:

Dell used to have something similar. When it worked, it was pretty much set and forget.

Yeah, I may still have a Dell setup CD for that somewhere in an old binder.

[Fazza]

49 minutes ago, Dos_Box said:

Yeah, I may still have a Dell setup CD for that somewhere in an old binder.

 

There are quite a few Compaq SmartStart CD images on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search?query=compaq+smartstart

[3s-gtech]

3 hours ago, 3s-gtech said:

It could be a pig of a job. I'm building a 'new' server today, and sticking 2025 on it is not proving to be easy or quick...I'm now trying via 2022 and that involved having no video output on boot.

It worked!

Taken ages to get this host working ready for migrations. Some things are simpler today, some not (*stares at SET and vswitch naming*)