Thanks for the info, however, I have tapped out - buying a used box with WinSomething on it already. Getting this to work may be easy for you all but it's been a bear for me. Reminds me of my days building my first linux machines... had to read 85 separate howtos and web pages before there were even web pages to read, lol. (lynx) Back then I could stay up all night and reboot 12 times and didn't care. Oh well. Thanks for all of ya'lls help.
Man that would have saved me alot of time. I tried installing again yesterday with my latest iso including theoembios and then I tried this morning with yours. Both time the install quit with "ERROR: An unknown error has occurred. The installation cannot proceed." That may have NOTHING to do with the iso, though. I am starting my install with a Dell "Installation and Server Management" CD because there are drivers on it that need to load. The error I get may be completely because of incompatibility with that CD.
Toonces06 ... The way I make an OEM slp of server 2003 standard. First.Download the retail version of server 2003.iso should be this one "File Name: en_windows_server_2003_standard.iso Date Published (UTC): 3/26/2003 500 PMLast Updated (UTC): 8/23/2006 6:39:45 PM SHA1: A600409482A5678EF6AF2B26D3576D6D9894178DISO/CRC: N/A" or whichever server edition you are using. second.Download your machine manufacture oem bios files they should be like this. OEMBIOS.BI_ OEMBIOS.CA_ OEMBIOS.DA_ OEMBIOS.SI_ So if you had a Dell machine manufactured by Dell you would be looking for Dell oembios's. Next get the product key OEM key for the server edition you are using. use google. now download powerISO. you need this to manipulate the image of the said iso image.or whichever one you are used to. now open up your server iso image with power iso and go to the file i386 and look for setup.ini and copy to your desktop and delete the one from the image. now look for the said oem bios files. delete the files that are stated in the above OEMBIOS.BI_ OEMBIOS.CA_ OEMBIOS.DA_ OEMBIOS.SI_.from the image and save image. you have to save at this point for the changes to take effect!!!. open up the iso image again and go to the i386 folder. now copy the downloaded OEM bios files into the i386 folder. Now open the setup.ini fle from your desktop and where it say's.. [Pid] ExtraData=786F687170637175716954806365EF Pid=69712000 where pid=69712000 replace the three 000 with OEM OEM is in capitals. and then save. Then copy this to the iso i386 folder or drag and drop save the image. then burn the image. use your product key for Dell oem server 2003 .... All Done. Hope this helps.. Let me know how you get on. btw if your last setup was in a raid configuration and you are using the same drive's please remember that you need the raid drivers installed on setup.. It should ask on installation if you need raid drivers installed .... just check first.