Hi, I have recently acquired a Dell PE850 with 1 x Dual Core 3.0GHz Xeon CPU, 4x2GB DDR2 ECC RAM and a 1TB HDD that I have been trying to get to boot into Windows 7 so I can update the BIOS to Revision A04 so I can boot from CD. The unit was bought secondhand and was previously installed with Oracle Enterprise Linux and was used as a testing platform and that booted fine. The server posts fine and gets to the "Starting Windows" screen but does not get past this, when the logo starts to come up, the unit crashes nd goes back to the bios, trying to boot once more.

So, did you just pull a drive from another system and stick it in the 850 and try to boot from it? That is almost guaranteed not to work. You'll need to do a clean install (or a repair install at a minimum).

Also, the BIOS version will not affect its ability to boot to "CD".

So, let's pick one OS to work with and troubleshoot and go from there (not 2003 or XP).

No, I didn't, I did a clean install each time I tried and about the 2003 and XP, I was just saying I have tried every version since them (2008, 2012, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1) and the problem persists. If I were to pick an OS, probably Win 7 would be my choice as I won't really have any reason to utilise the features on server edition software

Well, there are no guarantees that a client OS will run properly on a server, and you may get poor performance, especially with graphics.

Windows 7, then? What exactly happens when you attempt to boot to the Windows 7 DVD?

Well, there are no guarantees that a client OS will run properly on a server, and you may get poor performance, especially with graphics. Windows 7, then? What exactly happens when you attempt to boot to the Windows 7 DVD?

When I try to boot from CD, it just comes back as there is no boot device available, which I think is a problem with the BIOS, hence why i am trying to update it.