Need Help Loading Server 2003 32Bit on 12th Generation T420 PowerEdge

Hi RGuthrie,

In regards to newer Dell servers not supporting Windows Server 2003:

While it is true that it is not officially supported, there are some workarounds.  Some of my fellow Dell engineers created a page detailing how to load Windows Server 2003 on a 12th Generation Dell Server @

en.community.dell.com/.../3846.how-to-install-windows-2003-on-dell-12th-generation-poweredge-servers.aspx

Did you use the F6 method to load your storage drivers?  If your BSOD code is 7B I'm willing to bet that the correct storage driver is not loaded.

Thanks Peter for the Reply.  I can get the system load all the way but when it goes to boot after installing everything it will get into a reboot loop were it starts to boot, then hits some type of error (flashes so quickly you can't read the error) then reboots.  This happens after it has gone throught the partitioning, copying files, rebooting and asking for the company name, server name, administrator password and then reboots.  To answer your question...I used nlite to build a bootable OS with LSI drivers for the RAID.  Thanks again for your help and if you have find any other links reguard this topic please let me know since I haven't give up on it just yet.

A long time ago in an IT job far far away,  I used to manually build a lot of OS install images....

So you are building your own bootable media with the drivers embedded... I'm assuming nlite is editing the TXTSETUP.SIF to inject drivers into the OS image

I saw similar errors to the ones you are experiencing.  Sometimes the driver would be just fine for the text portion of the install but once plug and play got it's hands on the driver when windows was launching for the first time, if I didn't set up the  setup file and load the drivers just in the right order in the config file, I'd see a BSOD.  

Or, sometimes if the driver I was using wasn't 100% compatible, it would be fine for one phase of the install, but not another.

I would try to manually load drivers using F6 just in case there's some sort of conflict with another driver.  Sometimes drivers have several options available to you if you use F6.

To debug, I think there's a registry key to disable auto reboot on BSOD using regedit (you can open a cmd window while windows is asking you for your server name and password).   The key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CrashControl - “AutoReboot”.  

Not sure how much more I can help - I'm flying blind and remembering skills I last used 5 years ago - but hope it helps.

I meant use the default OS installation CD with no modifications, copy your driver on a USB floppy drive, and press F6 at the beginning of the install.

Hi.

Despite the detailed workaround, no Dell technician I've talked to seems to know anything about this custom driver.

Do you know if the drivers are available for download anywhere?