I'm a sysadmin at a building controls company. We are trying to revive a Building Management Server with very expensive and important software on it. I cannot for the life of me, install a single network adapter.
Their server died, so I backed up the hard drive and installed it in another computer. Loaded up ultimate boot disk, changed the registry keys (removed drivers and change processor type), then booted into windows.
Thinking I was almost done, I tried installing the onboard LAN adapter with no success. After trying over 5 different adapters including wireless cards and staying at the office till 2am, we still cannot get this server operational.
I have created an image and finally have the server as a virtual machine, yet can't even get the LAN adapter working with that!
Running out of ideas and a new installation of windows isn't possible due to licensing limitations.
I just need this server with a network adapter installed.
Can anyone think of anything else to try? I can't let this computer beat me..
Best Answer
As someone who has more experience in this type of thing than I'd like, I'd advise you to see if you can buy the same or similar hardware as was running this thing previously in order to sidestep the driver issue. At the very least, you want hardware from the same era, because as you're finding out, modern hardware is built to run modern operating systems, and generally doesn't bother to support old operating systems. There are probably local computer recyclers who can help you out with locating old hardware, and failing that, there are always online options, many of which specialize in obsolete hardware for this very reason.
Need to buy a a 15 year old server, such as an HP Proliant ML350 (Gen2) because of its NT 4.0 and Server 2000 support? Well, there's someone out there who'll be happy to dust one off for you in exchange for $1300. There's another guy who'll do it for a grand, and any number of others who will do it a lot cheaper if you know where to look. It's usually worth looking, too, as the standard solution to the issue of ICS vendors that can't be bothered to make their gear compatible with computing technology from the current millennium is to find hardware that works and stockpile it.
If you're smart, you have all your stockpiled replacements imaged up and ready to go on a moment's notice too, so whenever whatever computer is currently running your ICS software dies, it's just a matter of grabbing another one off the shelf and swapping it out for the dead one. There's a state-of-the-art, relatively new datacenter a few miles away from me that uses this very trick for their HVAC system - a small, unassuming little whitebox PC running Windows '95 is connected to the HVAC system by a very long serial cable, and is the unsung hero responsible for keeping the datacenter cool. And last I checked, there were 4 more identical whitebox PCs sitting on a shelf, waiting to be swapped in when the one currently doing the job gives up the ghost.