Windows 2000 Installation on Proliant ML110 G2

[Jonathon Green]

Hi all,

Apologies if I'm asking silly questions here but this is the first purpose built server I've dealt with and the installation/configuration process seems just a little more complicated than just stuffing a Red Hat 8 CD into the CD drive of an unsuspecting desktop machine and then setting up a few Samba shares!

I've just bought a bargain priced ML110 G2 to replace an aging desktop machine as the file/print server on my home network. The ML110 came configured with a single 80 GByte SATA drive and I've added a further 160 GByte SATA drive with the intention that the OS will go on the smaller drive and my data on the larger one with (for the moment) no RAID.

What I want to do is install a copy of Windows 2000 (workstation edition - there are only 4 workstations and a couple of machines acting as media players on the network so a proper Windows 2003 server installation seems like expensive overkill). As fars I can see what I need to do is to make up a floppy disk with the "HP NC10xx/67xx/77xx/150x/320x/325x Gigabit Ethernet NIC Driver for Windows 2000" and "HP Embedded SATA RAID Controller Driver for Windows 2000/Windows Server 2003" drivers, hit F6 when I boot from the Win2K installation CD and then point the installation process at my floppy with the additional drivers on.

What I'd like to know is:

1. Is what I want to do remotely feasible?

2. Have I missed anything out? - e.g. any other drivers etc required or configuration of the SATA controller required before OS installation.

and

3. Is there any way I can feed my extra drivers in from a prepared CD so that I don't have to take the box to bits and plumb in a floppy drive!

Thanks all. Sorry again if my questions are a bit naive but while it's not exactly a data centre class of machine this beast is considerably more sophisticated that anything I've dealt with before!

--
JG

[BR883982]

I have just built an ML110 G2 as a desktop using Windows XP
- no problems, as all the drivers were on the Microsoft CD
- except the Networking drivers, which I downloaded onto a CD

No need to add a diskette drive - Download additional drivers onto USB stick or CD-R

Added an Audigy 2 Sound card - worked fine

Added a Promise TX150 SATA RAID card with 2 SATA 160GB drives in RAID-1 for secure storage of 10 years of data. Realised that I could have made them all 300 MB/sec rather than 150MB/sec after I built it !

I added a matching DIMM in the correct slot to double the memory throughput from 2.9GHz to 4.6GHz !

Read about this here:

http://www.kingston.com/newtech/MKF_520DDRWhitepaper.pdf

http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/Dual_DDR_SB.pdf

Best wishes with your new machine

[Oleg Koroz]

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual&locale=en_US&docIndexId=179911&taskId=101&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=446009

[Kenneth Nyman]

I don't get Windows XP to install the Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server network drivers. I tried several different versions but nothing seems to work.

How did you guys make it work?