The text-based portion of Server 2003 Setup is very similar to Windows 2000’s text Setup. You get your welcome screen, make a few selections on where you want to do your install, and then you sit back and watch the Setup program copy a whole bunch of files. It’s a really simple click-Next-to- continue process, but there are some gotchas hiding in there, so I’ll go through it a bit at a time.
Note This is the first phase you’ll see if you’re installing by booting from the CD-ROM.
As soon as your machine boots into the text-based portion of Setup, you may notice a prompt at the bottom of the screen that tells you to press F6 if you need to install additional SCSI or RAID drivers. If you don’t want these additional drivers, just wait a few seconds and it will go away. But if your system has a SCSI or RAID controller that you know isn’t going to initialize without an OEM-provided driver, you’ll need to watch this part of Setup closely and hit F6.
The install starts off with a Welcome to Setup screen. You have the choice to set up Server 2003, repair an existing Server 2003 installation, or quit. The Press F3 to Quit option will live with you throughout this phase of the setup. If at any time during this phase you decide that you want to abort your setup attempt, this will be your escape route. Upon this exit, your system will be rebooted, but be aware that your boot.ini file will not have been changed. Subsequent reboots will still by
default cause your machine to restart the setup after 5 seconds at the boot menu. To get rid of this Anatomy of a Machine Ready for Setup, Phase 2
Ever wonder what makes a system continue along its setup path after a reboot? Or have you ever started into the second phase of the setup, had all sorts of problems, and wanted to start from scratch? It will help to know exactly what causes the second phase to start upon reboot so you can easily remove it later. These components are going to be present on your system after completion of the preinstallation phase of the setup:
◆ On the boot partition, a directory named $win_nt$.~bt has been created.
◆ All critical Server 2003 boot files, including enough drivers to access the network or CD source, have been copied to the $win_nt$.~bt directory.
◆ In the $win_nt$.~bt directory, a file named winnt.sif contains the information you provided from the first phase of the setup.
◆ The Server 2003 boot files have been copied to the boot partition (unless you’ve overridden them with a winnt or winnt32 option) if not already present. The system is now Server 2003–bootable. (Note that when I say “boot” I mean it in the standard this-is-the-drive-that-the-computer-boots-from meaning, rather than Microsoft’s “official” definition—for some reason, they define the partition that contains the bulk of the operating system files as the “boot” partition, and the partition that you boot from as the “system” partition. Don’t ask me why.)
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permanently, edit your boot.ini to reflect the default equal to your other operating system boot path
of choice. My machine looked like the following:
[Boot Loader] Timeout=5 Default=C:\$win_nt$.~bt\bootsect.dat [Operating Systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\winnt="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server"/fastdetect C:\="Microsoft Windows 98"
C:\$win_nt$.~bt\bootsect.dat="Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Setup"
To restore my machine to its original boot preferences, I changed the Default line back to my Windows 2000 Server boot selection and deleted the entire Windows Server 2003 Setup option. Consequently, my boot.ini looked like this:
[Boot Loader] Timeout=5 Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\winnt [Operating Systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\winnt="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server"/fastdetect C:\="Microsoft Windows 98"
Press Enter, and if you already have some NT-family operating system running on this computer then Setup will ask if you want to repair it. As we’re installing fresh, press ESC to continue. That’ll take you to the Disk Partitioning and Installation Location Selection screen. Be careful here. There are two things to do. The most obvious is the selection of the partition in which you want Server 2003 installed. Highlight the partition where you would like Server 2003 installed, and press Enter.
Let’s take this a step further. Beneath this screen is a very handy disk-partitioning utility. From here, you can completely redo your partitioning scheme. You can delete existing partitions, create new partitions out of unpartitioned space, and format partitions in either the NTFS or FAT format file systems.
Note You can find more information on disk partitioning in Chapter 10.
Before we begin partitioning our drives, let’s go back to the planning session we had earlier. Suppose for the sake of example that we want a 1GB Windows 98 C: partition, a 2GB system partition on drive D:, and a 4GB data partition on drive E:. Just to give us all the necessary scenarios to describe how the setup phase partitions drives, we’ll assume we have a current partition scheme of a 1GB C: with Windows 98, a 1GB D:, a 2GB E:, and a 3GB F: partition. To go from a 1-1-2-3 gigabyte partition scheme to a 1-2-4 gigabyte partition scheme, we are forced to delete almost all partitions, since we cannot reorder partitions. In other words, we cannot massage our existing second partition of 1GB into a 2GB partition without giving it more room first.
Let’s start by deleting the 1GB D: partition. Use the arrows to highlight the D: partition, and press D to delete. A confirmation screen will appear asking you to now either press L to continue the partition deletion or Escape to abort.
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Warning Always take this opportunity to second-guess yourself. Once you press L to confirm the deletion of the partition,
your partition and everything that was on it is gone. Ask yourself what data is on the D: drive. Make sure you can afford to lose it all. Do you have a backup of the data? If it contains a previous Server installation, do you have a backup of the security and accounts databases? If rebuilding a domain controller, have you promoted someone else to PDC? Do you have a recent Emergency Repair Disk available? If you are 100-percent confident that you don’t need anything on the partition, press L. When you come back to the main Disk Partitioning screen, you’ll see that the second partition of 1GB is now marked as unpartitioned space. Of course, it does no good to repartition this space now because the most you’ll get is 1GB again. That would defeat the purpose of the exercise. You need 2GB. So move on down the list to what was the 2GB E: partition and delete it in the same fashion. When you return to the main screen again, after confirming the deletion of the 2GB partition, you’ll find that the adjacent, unpartitioned spaces have turned into a single block of unpartitioned space equaling 3GB. Just to keep it simple, we now have our 1GB C:, a 3GB unpartitioned space from our combined, deleted 1GB and 2GB partitions, and a remaining 3GB partition.
At this point, we’ll go ahead and create our new 2GB D: partition. Highlight the 3GB free space and press C for create. You’ll move into a new screen where you’re shown the total available space within which you can create a partition and are asked how large a partition you want to make. By default, the maximum available space is filled in: 3GB. We want to drop that down to 2GB. Press Enter and presto! We have a 2GB new (unformatted) partition, followed by our remaining 1GB that we left out and the 3GB data partition.
After we delete our 3GB partition, it will melt into the adjacent 1GB partition, forming a 4GB unpartitioned space. We can create the new 4GB space and we’re set with partitioning anyway.
Now we still have to format our partition before we can use it. To format a partition, highlight the space listed as New (Unformatted) and press Enter to select the partition as your Server 2003 installation directory. Really, you’re not selecting a partition to format; you’re just selecting a parti- tion in which to install Server 2003. If Setup finds that your chosen installation partition is not formatted, you’ll get an additional screen to do just that. You are shown options to format FAT or NTFS, and now Server 2003 includes the options to do “quick formats” in each case. Once again, return to our planning phase of the setup. We should already know what format we want. Once the format is complete, we continue onward with the installation.
Tip If you want only to partition and format drives without continuing to do an installation, you can always choose to go
backward after the format and select another partition to format or install to, or you can simply exit the installation program. Setup will now examine your disks. This examination is not an intensive look into the reliability of your disk. It merely runs a CHKDSK-like utility to verify a clean file and directory structure. After the examination, Setup will copy all Server 2003 installation files to your chosen install location. Finally, the system will ready itself for the graphical setup phase and reboot.
Changes from NT 4’s Text-Based Setup
If you’re used to NT 4 servers and haven’t previously done a setup of either 2000 or Server 2003, then you’ll notice some things missing from this phase of the Windows 2000 setup compared to the setup for previous versions of Windows NT. You no longer get the options to define the following:
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