Getting early Itanium Server 2K3 builds going

[milkcanworld]

(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?

Edited February 27 by milkcanworld

[Tripredacus]

RIS would be using another file to know what it needs to copy. This could either be in the media or perhaps something in the OS. I would do a procmon trace on the RIS window/process to determine what files it reads before it gets to the task of actually copying the files. Then you have a better chance of finding where it is getting the instructions from.

Also make a dir (with no space in name) on your data disk* to store your OS into and manipulate it from there instead of from inside of My Documents.

* It is my presumption that you have set this up like a typical WDS/RIS implementation where your distribution share is not on the same volume as the OS.

[milkcanworld]

7 hours ago, Tripredacus said:

RIS would be using another file to know what it needs to copy. This could either be in the media or perhaps something in the OS. I would do a procmon trace on the RIS window/process to determine what files it reads before it gets to the task of actually copying the files. Then you have a better chance of finding where it is getting the instructions from.

Also make a dir (with no space in name) on your data disk* to store your OS into and manipulate it from there instead of from inside of My Documents.

* It is my presumption that you have set this up like a typical WDS/RIS implementation where your distribution share is not on the same volume as the OS.

Thanks for the tip on using procmon! For anyone who it may be useful to, the last version of procmon.exe/SysInternals that seems to run on this era of Windows is 3.10. You need at least SP1 installed on Server 2K3 to use it. You can get it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140625080651/http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx

I discovered the "lang\*" issue was from reminst.inf having an incorrect AdditionalClientDirs section. I changed it to:

[AdditionalClientDirs]
ia64\lang
ia64\asms
i386\asms

(Originally, it just had "lang" and "asms" under there.)

This got me back to the "...cannot find the file specified" issue. I tried removing all references to e100bnt5.sys in txtsetup.sif and layout.inf, but this made no difference. Looking in 2462's driver.cab, I see a "e100w64.sys" present, which is also present in 3590. I'm thinking maybe the driver file got renamed from e100bnt5.sys to e100w64.sys for IA-64 Windows but nothing besides the file itself got the memo yet in this build. Of course, I could be totally wrong about that, but I'm not using a PRO/100 card anyway. What I ended up doing was preparing a driver.cab that had an e100bnt5.sys present, then replaced the original driver.cab with it.

I copied all of the contents of the original driver.cab to a path with no spaces (I used C:\DriverCab). Then:

copy C:\DriverCab\e100w64.sys to C:\DriverCab\e100bnt5.sys
dir C:\DriverCab /s /b /a-d > C:\Files.txt
makecab /D CabinetName1=driver.cab /D MaxDiskSize=163840000 /D DiskDirectoryTemplate=C:\ /F C:\Files.txt

(MaxDiskSize prevents the cab from being split into a bunch of small cabs; also thanks: https://superuser.com/a/1317492, https://ss64.com/nt/makecab.html)

This got the image to successfully import, no idea if it works yet though. Thanks much!

Edited February 28 by milkcanworld

[milkcanworld]

I'm able to select it from the WDS OS selector, but after "Waiting for reboot..." it just sits at a black screen, setup not starting. Darn.