Alex Jurkiewicz's technical blog

Notes on installing Windows Server 2008 on a Desktop

After much pain installing Windows Server 2008 (x64, Enterprise, off the trial ISO from microsoft.com), I thought I'd note a few things here for future reference and the benefit of others:

• On my motherboard (Asus P5B-E (Intel ICH8 chipset)), Windows took a number of attempts to reinstall. Very aggravating! I finally installed it by plugging my boot into an ICH8 socket (as opposed to one controlled by the non ICH8 chip) and setting the ICH8 SATA drive mode to 'RAID' in the motherboard. IDE didn't work and AHCI didn't either.
• DEP is the devil. I had random crashes until I changed it from opt-out to opt-in. The setting is in the same place as on WinXP.
• This site has lots of useful info on setting up Server 2008 to be a little more usable.
• NVidia Vista64 drivers work fine.
• Opt in to the customer experience program. It has so far direct linked me to the latest ICH8 drivers, I'm hopeful it will prove more useful than the WinXP version.
• My machine still hardlocks instead of shutting down, but it happens after windows has done all its housekeeping and only seems to hurt my pride.

Comment (0)