New 2003 install reboots at progress bar screen

[johnrm]

Hi, this is my story. Hopefully, others have experienced this and will either help me find my problem, or find help from the solution I hope to get here.

I built an install cd with Silicon Image drivers built in so I don't need to constantly futz with my USB floppy to get it to be recognized by the new installation. That worked, or at least it seemed to work.

I also included some hotfixes in this installation following the OPK (OEM Pre-installation Kit) directions on including hotfixes to the installation. This also seemed to work.

Windows goes through the entire install process (it's not really unattended as I haven't yet built fully filled in all the details in the Winnt.sif script) prompting me along the way for the regular info, network, name, company name and date and time...... all acceptable to me, and finally, finishes the installation. Upon reboot, it comes up to the "Press any key to boot from CD..." prompt and I let it pass, then, the screen with "Windows 2003 Server, Compute Cluster Edition" pops up only for a fraction of a second, showing itself only as a ghostly image before the machine reboots. With or without the CD in the drive, the system ends up in this endless reboot cycle.

Where do I look for answers for this?

Thanks in advance for your help.

John

[VCC]

I don't presume to have an answer. Though, I do have a thought.

I went through a similar situation and found it was the BIOS that didn't fully support the memory I had.

Luckily they had produced an updated BIOS which happened to fix the particular problem and supportted more memory. Now the server is running, almost, great.

I say almost because I now have a couple of, what seem to be Active Directory problems. When the client goes to login it takes a minute to get to the desktop (Microsoft apparently has a hotfix I need to get) and when trying to add a group to the Administrators group on the PC it will not find the domain (even though the group does have Domain Admins in it and that works)

Good luck, I hope your issue gets solved quickly. As I know the frustration it can cause.

3 trips back to Fry's Electronics to replace the memory and the problem got solved.

I should have known better than to update the BIOS first.

[johnrm]

Well still no luck. I have no clue as to why it is going into a reboot loop. The system won't even boot up for the first time. But it seems to install fine, no error messages or anything.

I really need to understand what the loop is all about.

Could the Silicon Image Drivers be causing a problem? They seem to work just fine in textmode.

Has anyone had any experience similar to this?

[johnrm]

So now I'm figuring out that there is something messed up in my txtsetup.sif file.... but I'm not sure where. I know this because I used Nlite to set up an unattended CD and it works just fine. But as I respect the intellectual property of the writer of Nlite, I do not want to use it in my media as it will be sold in our machines.

Now I tried to look at what was different, and add those differences to my txtsetup.sif file, but that didn't work. One version gave me a Blue Screen of Death and the other just resorted to the same original error.

As far as I can tell, the files look identical (other than my file numbering and nlite's numbering).

Any ideas?

Thanks for the help in advance,

Cheers