[tmockingbird]

After a complete upgrade at my dad's office, he 'donated' his previous equipment to me. Amongst the stuff was a server with Windows Server 2003 installed, which didn't quite interest me. I am trying to install Windows Server 2008 or even Ubuntu Server on it, but so far I keep on running into trouble.

Installing Ubuntu was just for the heck of it, but since I got a shitload of errors trying to get that functional, I just gave up and am now trying to get Windows Server 2008 on there. The message I keep on getting is that Windows wasn't able to find suitable hard drives to get it installed on. I read something about a SCSI setup, so I opened up the case and removed the SCSI card to see if this would help out. However I still received the same message. So I decided to try and use Killdisk on it and zero the harddrives. Killdisk does perceive the drives, but freezes when it tries to zero them. I then tried to run the server hard drives as slave drives on my desktop and to format them from there, which led to my desktop crashing. Putting my desktop crash aside - which is now fully functional again though - I don't think formatting the hard drives would have worked anyways.

I checked the server for any other hardware that could be causing trouble, and basically unplugged everything besides the harddrives and the CD reader. Furthermore I tried using a (legit) copy of Windows Vista to see if that would install, and it gives me the exact same problem.

I'm really out of ideas here, and would just like to get this damn server up and running (although I have no clue how I would set it up once it'll work).. Any help? :)

Thanks in advance,

Tim

[tmockingbird]

Just a little edit;

I looked into everything a bit more, and apparently I would be able to run Windows 2008 on an ESXI i3 server, preferably using a RAID5 mirror (so that 1 out of 2 hard drives could fail).

Any feedback on this?