Originally posted by: bsobel
It should blue screen after the initial gui install, its by design. The blue screen is if the user didnt hit f6 and add the storage drivers. It does *not* indicate a problem, just that drivers weren't added.
Any drivers that work for 2003 should work for WHS.
It just so happens that I was building a new WHS box today. This was a six-year-old PC with a defective IDE hard drive that we decided to turn into a WHS for a small office. We added a 1 TB Hitachi SATA drive, a DVD drive, and a PCI SATA controller card.
The client made a mistake and purchased a VIA-based PCI SATA/IDE RAID controller card rather than a Silicon-Image-based SATA controller card that I'd specified, so I was in unexplored territory.
Every WHS server I've built in the past was using SATA drives in IDE Compatibility Mode, so I've never had to worry about drivers for the drive controller. This time, I definiitely needed drivers. The very first screen said there "are no compatible hard drives available".
The floppy drive, it turns out, was broken. But I was able to get WHS to format the drive by feeding it the driver CD (rather than the driver floppy disk) that came with the VIA RAID card. But right before rebooting for the first time, it warned that the TXTSETUP.OEM file was missing and there'd be a problem.
WHS then goes into what looks exactly like an XP/2003 setup screen and gives the opportunity to "Hit F6 to load drivers". I wasn't sure if I needed to do that, and I didn't have a functional floppy drive anyway, so I skipped it. Mistake. I got a bluescreen on the next boot, showing me that Windows couldn't find the hard drive.
I replaced the floppy drive with a new one and created a floppy disk with the VIA RAID drivers and started all over again.
I hit F6 at the "XP/2003" boot screen. Then I fed it the floppy disk with the VIA RAID controller drivers. Other than having problems getting WHS to find the correct files, WHS was finally happy. It rebooted again and went into a Windows GUI install screen, now coming from the hard drive rather than the Install DVD.
WHS performs more reboots during the install process than XP or 2003 or 2008. There must be twenty reboots in all. It bounces between a graphical Vista/2008 install routine, on to a text-mode XP/2003 install routine, onto an SBS 2003 install screen, and, finally, onto a graphical screen coming from the partially-installed hard drive system.
As Bill notes, as long as you feed it the correct drivers at the correct time and use a floppy disk at the second (F6) step, you should be able to get it to recognize both non-standard drive controller cards and RAID controllers.