Install dvd won't boot on older server

Thinking about it, I guess a floppy with CD or USB support could do the trick as well.

Also my install disks are good. Some are OEM and all have been tested on other systems.

Motherboard is Supermicro Super X5DEI-GG

DoctorIz said:

I'm at a loss as to how to proceed. If someone could send me a PE iso that will do what I need that would be very helpful. And before anyone asks, no these are not Itanium xeons.

Thanks in advance!

Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk

Thanks NavyLCDR, even though that iso uses PE it is etfs, but a custom PE disk that uses wim could be made. Regardless, floppy was the way to go. I made a Gujin boot disk that was able to pull up the dvd drive and launch setup. Turns out my system is 32bit even though it has 64 bit video and PCI. So I popped in a 32bit disk and its been hung on the windows logo for about 30min now... Any advice?

DoctorIz said:

Turns out my system is 32bit even though it has 64 bit video and PCI. So I popped in a 32bit disk and its been hung on the windows logo for about 30min now... Any advice?

A couple things you can try -

Like you suggested earlier - make a small partition on the hard drive, like 5 GB, copy the Windows installation files to it and run them from there.

Disconnect all hardware not actually required to install Windows and then after you get the basic install done add the hardware items back one at a time, installing the driver for each piece of hardware one item at a time.

Booting from floppy disk - wow, that brings back memories. Which one was it - was it DOS 6.22 or Windows 3.1 that had 13 installation floppies?

During installation have no connection to the internet available.

Navy, no it was a linux based disk with the Gujin boot manager. I do recall the days of swapping out disk after disk, or trying to download over 2400baud (or worse yet 300baud.) I do not miss it!

The only thing in there to pull is a wifi card, but I will try that. I thought we were past the point of IRQ conflicts and the like. I didn't/don't have any network connections. What would you recommend to do the partitioning? fdisk? What type of filesystem should I make? Fat16?

Thanks for helping BTW

Update: I pulled the card, and it didn't make a difference. So partition table here I come... Still open to software recommendations.

I would think you can use any partitioning program you can get to boot to partition the hard drive. I would recommend a 5GB FAT32 partition at the very end of the drive. Have you Googled Xeon processor compatibility? It looks like it is very difficult to get Windows 10 to run on it.