Sun Java Workstation W2100z

(Imported from rocketcat-v1)

Well, this machine from Sun is a pretty mean piece of equipment. It's in a very retro coloured metallic purple case with a brushed aluminium front panel. It's got a pair of Opteron CPUs in it and a couple of gigs or RAM. What it doesn't have is a floppy drive. Or an easy way to install Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.

The problem lies in finding drivers for the SCSI card, and then getting them to load during the Windows installer. Easier said than done.

I eventually located some drivers from Adaptec or, if HostRAID is turned on, even if you're not using the RAID capabilities you need this driver instead. Now, why can't Adaptec get their shit together and release one driver that supports this card no matter what configuration it's using?.

I then had to track down a USB floppy drive (no mean feat in itself) and after many hours of stuffing around, I eventually got it working - HINT: Even though it's an AMD-64 CPU, don't try to load the AMD-64 drivers, instead load the IA-32 drivers as it's a 32-bit version of Windows for Intel CPUs... d'oh!

After all this, someone from Sun helpfully pointed me at this page that has all the drivers available for download from Sun. There's also an ISO image of the supplimental CD, with Linux, Solaris x86 and Windows drivers, as well as a XPReburn utility that can reburn your OS installation CD with the correct drivers preinstalled... Yay, a whole day down the drain getting that all figured out...