My first exposure to W2K was installing the Professional version on my house workstation. Professional should be considered the equivalent of the successor to Windows NT 4.0 Workstation.  That was basically an uneventful experience as all went fairly well.  It seems to be a stable desktop operating system although it is a bit slow when first booting up.  That is not normally a problem since we leave our systems running 24x7.  However our son still clings to Windows 98, mainly for his games. So we sometimes have to reboot to get back into W2KP.  W98 is not particularly stable at this point so I like being able to boot into Windows 2000.  I installed W2KP on top of my Windows 98 installation. I did not upgrade from 98 to W2K but instead installed it to another directory (actually another hard drive too). Now I have the option of selecting which operating system I want when I boot. This is called ‘dual booting’ in NT parlance. I also installed Windows 2000 Server (W2KS) as well so I guess I’m ‘triple booting’. 

In order to really see how W2K works, I have decided to install it on our primary network server. This server provides not only domain authentication but runs Proxy Server for Internet access, IIS web server, Exchange Server for email, SQL Server for database, and GoldMine which hosts its data on SQL.  These services are vital to my business so I must approach this conversion cautiously. I don’t want to disrupt my business while going through this transition and learning curve. What I have decided to do is to sneak up on it and install Windows 2K on the server sort of gradually. Again I will use dual boot. I also decided to install W2K on a new hard drive. That way I will have plenty of room for all the new stuff and can leave my existing system intact. 

Since my small server originally had two physical IDE disks, a CD, and a tape drive, I had to make room for the new hard drive. The second hard drive mainly contained my Exchange Server databases, PUB.edb and PRIV.edb.  I used the Exchange Optimizer to move these to the primary drive. I was then able to remove the second drive from the machine. I ran my server for a bit with only the one drive to be sure that everything would still work.  It did!  My goal is to have the new Windows 2000 drive be the boot drive so I wanted to put that as Drive 0. To do this, I had to make my original drive the Slave so my new drive could be the Master. But I still had to be able to boot to my original drive even though it was now the slave. I have been using an NT boot diskette to boot my server for some time (one of the reasons for wanting the new drive to be the boot drive). So I made a copy of this boot diskette and changed the Boot.ini file to point to rdisk(1) (the second drive on the system - primary slave) instead of rdisk(0) (primary master). I tested this with the new hard drive installed as the master but without partitioning or formatting it (I want W2K to do this for me). It worked great! I was still able to access all of my server data and applications as before. 

Next on to installing Windows 2000!  If you already know a bit about Windows NT, you will have to relearn stuff for W2K. The first is how to make a setup diskette set.  In NT 4.0 you would do so by going to the \i386 subdirectory on the NT CD and running WINNT /OX (WINNT32 /OX if you’re running on NT already).  Well, that doesn’t work with W2K. After snooping around the CD, I found a directory called ‘Bootdisk’. Inside this directory are two programs, MAKEBOOT and MAKEBT32. However I wanted to have some reassurance that this was really the way to make the setup floppies. In the root directory of the CD I found a file called ‘Read1st.txt’. Nope, nothing there about set up disks. There is also a much larger file called Readme.doc. Nothing there either. Searching more I found a directory called ‘Setuptxt’. Inside there I found 3 obscure files, Advsrv1.txt, 2 & 3.  I opened each in turn looking for how to create the set up disks. Finally I found it in Advsrv3 and it confirmed that using MAKEBOOT was the way to go.  Remembering that in NT 4.0 if you are making your boot disks from a system already running NT, you must use WINNT32, I decided that perhaps MAKEBT32 would be the W2K equivalent.  I used this instead and it work! W2K now requires 4 diskettes as opposed to NT 4.0’s 3. 

The actual installation process took quite a while.  Luckily I was able to occupy the time by cleaning up my office a bit so the fire department wouldn’t condemn it.  I decided to load the Advanced Server so I will be able to play with all three versions, Professional, Server, and Advanced Server. Using Advanced Server will also let me install SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition. As with NT, you are presented with the licensing agreement part way through the process. With NT, you have to scroll down through the entire license before you are told to press F8 to accept. You must also scroll through the entire W2K license but are never given any clue as to how to accept or decline the license agreement. I looked, hard. Finally I tried F8 and it worked!  I also noticed that the beta software I was installing, Release Candidate 2, had a limited lifetime. I knew it would, but was quite pleasantly surprised to see that it was for 444 days, much longer than any other evaluation software I’ve encountered. Don’t know if Microsoft was being generous or just pessimistic about their release date. 

The Advanced Server installation contains a number of wizards that walk you though installing numerous services and features. There is also a registration feature that I tried. After asking for your basic information and whether you’d allow the registration process to also pass along additional information about your system (I declined), the wizard automatically dials an 888 number and passes on your info. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the install process had properly identified my USR Courier v.Everything modem although it installed my USR 33.6 modem as a generic. I was also able to easily configure my system for Internet access. 

My current plan is to build up my W2K test system using the W2KAS (Advanced Server) on my office server and running W2KS (server) on the house workstation. I will build my network applications, Exchange, SQL, Proxy, etc., from here and use the W2KS as my client. When all is ready and somewhat stable, I can move my live data to W2KAS and start running everything from Windows 2000.  Wish me luck!