Like deja vu all over again ...

When I installed the original Solaris 10 bits (the 6.06 bits) on a machine, I was amazed at how incredibly confused and useless the installer was. For a supposedly powerful OS to have so completely useless an installer didn’t amuse me, it frustrated me. Keep this in mind. I am installing, or put more accurately, attempting to install, Windows 2003 x64 server.

Boots from the DVD/CD on the USB2 port. So far so good. Gets into the setup mode, presents me with disks to install on. Also good. Select one, give it oh, say 500 GB to play with. Creates the partition (this is windows creating the partition), and …. … it has to copy some files to a windows compatible partition in order to be able to finish the installation, and since we don’t have any windows compatible partitions apart from the partition it just created …. oh never mind. If I can’t get this going by creating a second partition, I will just have to boot back into Linux, create the NTFS partition by hand, and let it copy files there. Maybe create a large VFAT partition as well. Just to be safe. I am reasonably sure this is not what Microsoft intended. More later as I work through this. Update 1: Windows adamantly refused to install, even with 2 partitions created, by windows, both of several hundred gigabytes. I am now formatting the partitions as ntfs and FAT after booting into SuSE 10.2. Will give windows a disk entirely to itself. 250 GB should be enough for the install … I hope… Lets hope this works better. Update 2: Windows still adamantly refused to install. I switched to non-linux mode for the disks in BIOS, created partitions, yadda yadda yadda. It refused installation on any partition, claiming it wanted more space (I gave it more than it asked for). Could be a driver issue, possibly windows doesn’t really have a clue as to which disk is which. Pulled all but 1 of the 750 GB drives. Lets see if forcing the issue helps … Update 3: Ok, this is more promising. Now it is NTFS formatting a 256 GB partition I gave it (quick format, or we will be here all day). More later … Update 4: Alrighty then. It is installing. It asked me how I wanted to license it. Wouldn’t it be terrible if we weren’t able to do testing due to a lack of licensing? Well, most of the work will be on the local machine, so I don’t think we will consume CALs. I hope I can get 64 bit versions of iozone and bonnie++ for windows x64 2003 server :( Got to look. Might try the mingw compiler, but this will generate 32 bit versions, and it might not work on x64. I seem to remember hearing the Microsoft offers its C++/C compiler gratis (command line version only). Will see … Update 5: Success!!! well sort of. It is mute, it doesn’t know about its networks. Lack of a driver. But other than that, it is up. Next step, get it talking on the net. FWIW: this installer, while not nearly as easy as SuSE or Ubuntu Linux, is lightyears better than Solaris. Update 6: Gaak… driver hell. Intel doesn’t make it obvious which driver to pull down for the Pro/1000 card. You have to navigate and navigate … and then you see 64 bit 2003 server and you think it is it …. but no, its Itanium2. So you navigate and navigate … and search and search and navigate. Finally you give up, try google, and it finds something. Hopefully this thing it finds works. There are too many versions of windows. There aren’t enough drivers for all these versions. Figuring out which driver goes with which part is … well … not fun. Update 7: [insert the sound of a loud sigh] IOzone is running on the machine … I am not sure if I can vncview it yet, will work on that. 22.9 TB of NTFS. Iozone built with cygwin. Will see if we can build it via the windows compilers…