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Windows Server 2003 x86_64 delayed to March 2005

Damnit MS, I want my damn 64 bit OS. The beta I'm running now is at least at the release candidate level as far as stability goes. Does that mean XP x86_64 will be delayed too? I'm guessing it is just driver issues and 3rd party software holding it up, although the word on the streets is that they are waiting for Intel (who is strategically sitting on their thumbs as far as x86_64 goes, thanks Intel for delaying the game yet again, jerks).

posted on Monday, July 26, 2004 10:09 AM

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# re: Windows Server 2003 x86_64 delayed to March 2005 7/26/2004 10:29 AM Kai

You could always use Linux instead. The only problems Linux has are with some kinds of media and gaming... it sounds like this is for your server anyway, tho', so Linux would be better anyway.

Slackware, SuSE, or maybe Redhat/Fedora, though I'd stick with SuSE or Slackware.

# re: You could always use Linux instead 7/26/2004 1:12 PM travis

Kai, I have attempted to install linux at least 5 times, however there always seems to be something that goes wrong each time. Right now I have SuSE 9.1 on a partition but the setup failed to successfully install GRUB on a floppy. (I really don't want to overwrite my windows boot partition.) So the only way to boot to the partition (that I know of) is to boot off the boot.iso setup CD I made and pick to boot from the HD. However, this stopped working after the first 2 times I used it and now I get a big list of failed to initialize errors and then sometimes I'll get a command prompt. SuSE's YaST installer seemed to be the easiest for me by far, but apparently it's still to hard since I have yet to have a single successful install. If Redhat/Fedora's or Slackware's support of amd64 comes out of beta I might try them out. Last time I checked they were both still in beta, but that was a few months ago.

# re: Windows Server 2003 x86_64 delayed to March 2005 7/30/2004 4:36 PM travis

Well, I just tried Fedora core 2 x86_64 last night. It has a similar problem to the SuSE install. During setup (unless I missed something, which is likely), there is no option to install GRUB onto a floppy. You can only choose from a mounted partition. Why do linux installs think I would want to overwrite my default windows bootloader? WTF?

# re: Windows Server 2003 x86_64 delayed to March 2005 12/23/2004 4:57 PM dario

Well pardon me for being blatant, but, why would you bother to install linux anyway? As it seems to me you are waiting on MS to make a move. And FYI grub can be installed on a floppy *manually*,
you have two files which usually resides on the /boot/grub/ subdirectory, named stage1 and stage2. What you have to do to bring the floppy boot loader to life is to insert blank floppy in the drive,
type in the command prompt;
dd if=/boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
dd if=/boot/grub/stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 skip=1

The real problem is, that *any* version of MS toy OS overwrites MBR on the disk not asking you anything, and you want to keep that blatant piece of uniboot OS loader?

Well, it is your machine -> your choice :)

Have fun...

# re: dario 12/24/2004 2:14 AM travis

yeah, I attempted to manually install grub on a floppy after installing Fedora Core 2 awhile back. I used the exact same process you described (and a few others as well), I had no luck. Maybe they got it right in FC3 though, I'll probably try out SuSE again before Fedora though.

And FreeBSD was much harder on my MBR than MS was, because it specifically asked me what I wanted to do, I told it not to install any bootloader at all and to leave my existing bootloader intact, and it created a separate partition and corrupted the MBR on all my windows drives anyways.