I don't know anything about installing Windows 2008. However, I might have some advice on booting from an external CD/DVD drive.
Some drives take more time than others to become ready after being told to reset themselves and see if there's a disc inserted. Unfortunately, the BIOS of a DL380 G4 (or any Proliant of about the same age) can be kind of picky about that.
When a G4-era Proliant system boots up, you'll first see some memory tests, then all the BIOS extensions print out some messages (usually iLO, the SmartArray, any other SCSI or FibreChannel HBAs, and network-bootable NICs). After all these extensions have printed out their messages, the screen clears and there will be a prompt that tells you to press F9 to access the main Proliant BIOS settings. After that, the system starts trying to boot from any configured bootable devices. Look closely at the display and the DVD drive at this point.
By default, boot from a CD/DVD is at the top of the list. If an internal CD/DVD is detected, it will probably be used first. Then, any USB-connected CD/DVD drives are told to reset themselves and report if there is a disc. Unfortunately, some CD/DVD drives take more time here than the Proliant BIOS is willing to wait. If you see the DVD drive LED start blinking and/or hear the drive spin up, but see a message telling that the CD/DVD boot attempt failed before the drive LED stops blinking, your external DVD drive may be starting up too slowly, so the BIOS gives up before the drive completes its reset and disc detection cycle.
Unfortunately, there is not much you can do to make a slow external DVD drive faster. You might try:
- updating the drive firmware, if a newer one is available
- trying a different DVD. If you're using a writeable media, i.e. DVD+/-R or DVD+/-RW, the media type and writing mode may matter too. Track-at-once burning, RW discs and multi-session mode may sometimes make the disc detection slower than R discs burned Session-at-once/Disc-at-once in single-session mode.
If the boot messages indicate the system is only trying to boot from a hard disk even though CD/DVD drive is set first in the BIOS boot order, the BIOS might not be detecting your USB DVD drive at all. Try connecting the drive to a different USB port, if possible. (I think I once saw a server that had USB ports both in the front and the rear, but only the rear ports worked for booting. Unfortunately I remember neither the manufacturer nor the model of that server.)
MK
