In the morning I try the Ghost again, and finally get it working. I had to boot into Windows and format the spare hard drive in NTFS before I could actually use it for backing up onto.

So… I start the 3rd part of the install again and leave the server doing it’s stuff, occasionally checking to see if it needs a new CD. I wander back in an hour or two later and find the damn thing has blue screened! God, I was so pissed off.

It takes so damn long to install SBS from scratch and I’d just wasted over a day just getting to that point… I was ready to scream and start beating the crap out of the computer. I managed to restrain myself though!

I decided to try installing Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition instead of the entire Small Business Server 2003 pack, this went much more smoothly! I went to add Active Directory and tried to join the server into the domain I’d replicated onto my spare… but discovered I’d made a fatal error. I hadn’t installed DNS onto the spare, which meant that the server couldn’t discover the domain at all. This wasn’t my only fatal error.

I also needed to change the spare to a Global Catalog before killing off the domain hosted on SBS. What a total ballsup! I tried and tried to get DNS installed and working on the spare PC but just hit a brick wall.

So, I gave up. There wasn’t anything I could do, so I’d have to shut it down and start a brand new domain in a brand new forest. Hoping, against hope, that I could still get into my mailbox even though it would no longer be able to be assigned to my user account automatically.

Back downstairs, I installed Active Directory and started a new forest and domain; then added my user account and added myself to the Administrators account. Then I started the Exchange 2003 install, first with a /forestprep then a /domainprep and finally run the install without a parameter.