Tonight's Laptop Issues

On my work laptop, I had finally reached my limits with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for my demo and test systems. The main problem being that it doesn't support 64 bit guest operating systems, now required for Exchange 2010, OCS 2007 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2, and more.

For some reason, I decided that tonight would be a good night to rebuild my laptop with Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate and start using Hyper-V. Little did I know that my night would involve installing Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on my home desktop. The installation of Windows Server 2008 just wasn't working from the DVD, I don't know if it was my drive, or the discs, but I tried several copies, with no luck. The DVD booted, and I got passed the point where I deleted the previous partition, but it wouldn't install, and would error saying that it couldn't read the DVD.

Since I had wiped out my computer, and needed to do something to get it back up and running. Did I want to just go back to Vista, maybe Windows 7, but each of those would have required burning a DVD and I didn't know if it would work or not. My solution was to setup Virtual PC on my desktop, install Windows Server 2008 x86 and enable Windows Deployment Services. I was crossing my fingers that it would be able to deploy Windows Server 2008 R2, and it worked great.



Now, it is the early AM and I only have a bare bones operating system. There is so much more to do. First things first, remove the computer from the aaaz.local domain!