I am attempting to install windows 2003 R2 standard addition on the following system currently running Windows XP. PROCESSOR Intel Core2 Duo 375W,E6550 (2.33GHz,1333Mhz FSB, 4MB L2 Cache, Dual Core) edit OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows XP Professional, SP2 (NTFS) (+ Media) - English (32bit) edit TOWER/BASE ORIENTATION Vertical Chassis Orientation (Minitower, W: 170,2 x H: 447.3 x D: 468.4 mm) edit BUSINESS SUPPORT No Business Support Required edit MEMORY 4GB ( (4 x 1.0GB DIMM) 800MHZ DDR2 ECC SDRAM Memory edit GRAPHICS CARD 256MB nVidia NVS 290, Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Graphics Card (ULGA8) edit HARD DRIVE 160GB (7,200 rpm) SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache edit OPTICAL DRIVE 48X CDRW/DVD The box is a Dell T3400. All the specs fit the server requirments. Does anyone have any suggestions? Just to summarize. I'm booting from CD. The drivers are copied across and when windows attempts to start the blue screen crash occurs. Jay

It sounds to me like you have fallen into the very small cracks of a compatability problem... Theoretically, every machine that is built needs to be checked to make sure that it is compatible with a Windows OS, and if you got a box from Dell, there is a possiblity that they checked it for XP, but not Windows 2003. The things you are going to need to check: Check the BIOS of your machine and see if there is a "safe" type of operation mode. This is usually on the opposite side of the performance spectrum. Make sure that your hardware is on the HCL or "Server Catalog": http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/ See if Dell can hook you up with a HAL that can be loaded with Windows 2003 Server. Also, check to see if you can get a "boot driver" or "disk controller driver" that can be loaded prior to the OS. My experience with loading Windows Server tells me that there is a probability that you will not find a way to install Windows 2003 on that hardware. I think that it may be easier to run a bare-bones install of XP and use Virtual PC to load Windows Server 2003 - although there is the associated performance hit... Luck,

It sounds to me like you have fallen into the very small cracks of a compatability problem... Theoretically, every machine that is built needs to be checked to make sure that it is compatible with a Windows OS, and if you got a box from Dell, there is a possiblity that they checked it for XP, but not Windows 2003. The things you are going to need to check: Check the BIOS of your machine and see if there is a "safe" type of operation mode. This is usually on the opposite side of the performance spectrum. Make sure that your hardware is on the HCL or "Server Catalog": http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/ See if Dell can hook you up with a HAL that can be loaded with Windows 2003 Server. Also, check to see if you can get a "boot driver" or "disk controller driver" that can be loaded prior to the OS. My experience with loading Windows Server tells me that there is a probability that you will not find a way to install Windows 2003 on that hardware. I think that it may be easier to run a bare-bones install of XP and use Virtual PC to load Windows Server 2003 - although there is the associated performance hit... Luck,

Hello Customer, Thank you for using TechNet Forum, and also many thanks for Aaron's assistance. Please note, this forum is for General questions on Windows Server 2008. I suggest you try to post Windows Server 2003 related issue to the Windows Server 2003 Newsgroup for your best serve: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/newsgroups/serveros/win2003.mspx Thanks for your understanding. Moreover, the blue screen is mostly caused by hardware or drivers incompatibility. I suggest you take a look at the following website If the hardware appear to be on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL): http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hcl/default.mspx Thanks. Best wishes --------------Morgan Che Microsoft Online Community Support

I just got 20 of these for my company and they are not supported by Dell (for drivers) but you can get it to boot. In the Bios you need to turn on the ATA compatability mode and the OS will load. I found most of the Drivers for the XP install worked. Minus -- Card Reader andUSB ports (after the os installes) usb works in Bios but not in OS

I hope this can help. I bought DELL T3400 for server application. After I tried to install Window 2003 server, it came up with blue screen when Windows tried to start up between installation. Iwent to find Intel home page for RAID driver. The current driverversion for Intel ICH8R/ICH9R SATA RAID CONTROLLER will be 7.8. Please see readme before you download driver because it will tell you how to extract driver for floppy disk, for example: Use one of the following command examples to extract the driver files from the different package types: c:\iata_cd.exe -a -a -pc:\<path> c:\iata_enu.exe -a -a -pc:\<path> c:\setup.exe -a -pc:\<path> When the command is run, the installation process begins; simply click through the dialogs as prompted. This will not install the driver, it will only extract the driver files to <path>. After the extraction is completed, the driver files can be found in <path>\Driver. After that you can use Pre-install method F6 of Windows 2003 server.

If you go to the dell website and download the XP pre-install drivers, they work fine. The next problem is finding network drivers, so I am working on that right now.

The correct net drivers to use are the Windows 2000 versions on Dell's site. The XP video driver and sound driver on Dell's site worked just fine, too.

Hi, regarding the installation of W2K3 r2 64-bit Standard Edition on a Dell Precision T3400 and having the BSOD (blue screen of death) when installing W2K3 or windowsXP. I just talked to a technical representative of Dell and he gave me the following working solution. - Boot the Workstation - Go To the Bios with F2 - Go To Drives, then SATA OperationHere are 3 options. most likely the AHCI option is enabled for raid. You have to disable this, and enable the ATA raid operation in order to get w2k3 or windowsXP installed. I did this, and it worked instantly. I was having this problem on a Dell Precision T3400 with a SAS 6/Ir card inserted with 2x146gb SAS drives in raid1 attached. HTH

Dear VdbdevThank you very much for your suggestions. I struggled for the last one week for this solution.Once again thank you for posting valuable suggestions.Srinivasu Jogijsrinivasu@hotmail.com

This helped us a great deal. Thank you very much for sharing !! I am attempting to install windows 2003 R2 standard addition on the following system currently running Windows XP. PROCESSOR Intel Core2 Duo 375W,E6550 (2.33GHz,1333Mhz FSB, 4MB L2 Cache, Dual Core) edit OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows XP Professional, SP2 (NTFS) (+ Media) - English (32bit) edit TOWER/BASE ORIENTATION Vertical Chassis Orientation (Minitower, W: 170,2 x H: 447.3 x D: 468.4 mm) edit BUSINESS SUPPORT No Business Support Required edit MEMORY 4GB ( (4 x 1.0GB DIMM) 800MHZ DDR2 ECC SDRAM Memory edit GRAPHICS CARD 256MB nVidia NVS 290, Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Graphics Card (ULGA8) edit HARD DRIVE 160GB (7,200 rpm) SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache edit OPTICAL DRIVE 48X CDRW/DVD The box is a Dell T3400. All the specs fit the server requirments. Does anyone have any suggestions? Just to summarize. I'm booting from CD. The drivers are copied across and when windows attempts to start the blue screen crash occurs. Jay

Thanks alot vdbdev.Yoursuggestion helped us.I have Dell optiplex 755 with XP OSand on trying to install w2k got Blue screenwith stop exception 0x07.On changing SATA operation it worked immediately

Hi, regarding the installation of W2K3 r2 64-bit Standard Edition on a Dell Precision T3400 and having the BSOD (blue screen of death) when installing W2K3 or windowsXP. I just talked to a technical representative of Dell and he gave me the following working solution. - Boot the Workstation - Go To the Bios with F2 - Go To Drives, then SATA Operation Here are 3 options. most likely the AHCI option is enabled for raid. You have to disable this, and enable the ATA raid operation in order to get w2k3 or windowsXP installed. I did this, and it worked instantly. I was having this problem on a Dell Precision T3400 with a SAS 6/Ir card inserted with 2x146gb SAS drives in raid1 attached. HTH Thank you, vdbdev!!!!

Yippee!!! Thank God for the Internet...took me only one BSOD, a quick 'let me google that for you' and I got it fixed. :)

Hi vdbev. Perfect. Worked like a charm. And I didn't even have to contact Dell (my first idea was (ofcourse) to see if Microsoft knew anything about the problem). Thanks allot. Best regards Mikkel