I downloaded and burned the DVD image for the Windows Home Server RC set and fired up my cobbled together PC I had chosen as a victim for the new software. All went well until the installer said my BIOS didn’t support ACPI. But it did. So I downloaded the latest firmware for the trusty K7 Master board and flashed the BIOS. It died. So I dug the BIOS out of the spare board (everyone has one of those don’t they?) and tried again in a much slower, safer way but that one died too. So I stripped anything useful off the machine and sold it on eBay. The boards are on their way to a WEEE-compliant equivalent of landfill.
One bright light around all this was a discovery of a cool website. I’m guessing you have no floppy drive on your PC anymore right ? So what happens if your hard drive fails or you need to zap a disk partition and you want to go ferreting around in MS-DOS ? No chance of using a bot-disk. I wonderif it is possible to build a bootable CD-ROM ? Oh hang on, my computer is broken and I don’t have any MS-DOS disks left laying around. AllBookDisks is the place to visit. Go there today and get yourself another way of getting your broken machine back to life.
I am of course now slowly building a new PC to get HomeServer running. When I do, I’ll report back on how I get on.
