(Crossposting from BA)
Hi all,
Let me start this post out by saying that I'm not a Windows person, and don't have too much of a clue on things when it comes to what's going on the scenes behind Windows installation media.
I'm interested in the early builds of Windows for Itanium, e.g. Server 2003 Beta 2 (5.1.2462), Beta 3/ASLE 1.1 (5.1.3590), and Advanced Server Limited Edition 1.2.
I have an HP i2000, effectively a rebadged Intel Itanium Software Development Vehicle, with two Merced CPUs. From my understanding, this should basically be the de facto machine for running these Windows builds given what was out at the time, but ASLE 1.2 complains about the PAL version on (at least) my i2k being too old.
I'm unable to get 5.1.2462 or 5.1.3590 from the archive to properly boot on the machine; after running setupldr you get a screen complaining about a missing or damaged txtsetup.sif, status 2. From a bit of research it seems like this error could also pop up on Itanics where the CD-ROM was on a SCSI device with a high ID with these builds, but in my case I'm using an IDE CD-ROM drive which would have been the standard on these machines. I don't think my burn is the issue, I've been able to verify everything successfully through Alcohol 120%.
I thought to try using Windows Deployment Services, which led me down the path of learning that WDS was basically retrofitted into Server 2003 R2 later, and WDS on 2003 R2 was quite unhappy with both 5.1.2462 and 5.1.3590. I then installed base 2003 and Remote Installation Services, which gladly takes the 5.1.3590 image but is not a fan of 2462:
As you can see, for some reason it's looking for a 'lang' folder under the root of the tree, which seems strange to me as that seems to typically be under ia64\ or i386\ on the media. I'm not sure what's making it look there, as I said I'm not well informed on the mechanisms behind Windows install media. However, I'm very interested in seeing these old builds go, so if anyone has any ideas please let me know!
Also, I tried putting 'lang\' and friends from ia64 in the root, and it gets further, but:
(no, I didn't think this would work. why not try though? )
I have a proper VGA2USB device, so when I have this working I can take recordings of the setup, using the system, etc.
Later, I verified that RIS is fine with the IA-32 version of 5.1.2462. What could be causing RIS to search for lang\* under the root of the install media for the Itanium distribution?