Pitfalls of Small Business Server 4.0 Setup 1

[Mardawg]

In reference to my last post about Small Business Server I have the solution and have found a few pitfalls that I think other people should be aware of.<br>
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First of all we all know that Microsoft Operating systems don't play well with third party partitions during setup. It is best to start with a freshly formatted drive.<br>
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Second during install you should accept whatever modem setup finds until the setup completes. Changing the driver to a third party driver can cause setup to freeze during DHCP installation.<br>
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Finally setup boot disk #2 has a file called winnt.sif. This file tells setup how to perform. It apparently defaults to an unattended install which is fine assuming that setup finds the right drivers for your nic and other hardware. If setup does not find the right drivers you will receive a BSOD when setup starts the networking components. My work around was to edit the following section in the winnt.sif file:<br>
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The original was:<br>
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[Network]<br>
DetectAdapters=&quot;&quot;<br>
InstallDC=*<br>
InstallProtocols=InstallProtocolsSection<br>
InstallServices=InstallServicesSection<br>
InstallInternetServer=InstallIISSection<br>
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My edit was:<br>
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[Network]<br>
Attended=Yes<br>
InstallDC=*<br>
InstallProtocols=InstallProtocolsSection<br>
InstallServices=InstallServicesSection<br>
InstallInternetServer=InstallIISSection<br>
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After working around these 3 pitfalls the setup worked perfectly. I appreciate the help offered by my fellow tek tippers and I wanted to alert people to these situations so that others can hopefully avoid my misery.<br>
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[DougP]

Way to go<br>
Are you going to upgrade to SBS 4.5<br>
It allows upto 50 users instead of 25 among other things<br>
It's Free too.<br>
And each program like SQL, Proxy and so forth are more robust.

 

[Mardawg]

DougP Thank you for the information. I am an independent consultant and I will recommend to my client an upgrade to 4.5. They were under a bit of a time constraint on the server so the first move was to get this one up and running. By the way I saw the rest of the conversation about BSOD interpretation and Tech Net, and if you need any further information post and let me know. My posting did leave something to be desired in information.