I admit it today I used a floppy disk! Who would’ve thunk it?

In order to build our dev environment we decided to buy obselete servers from ebay and use them as virtual hosts. The idea being that we could back up the virtual servers easily and just move them about as hardware dies or becomes bogged down. My advice if you are considering this same path is DON’T DO IT!

I thought floppy drives were a thing of the past, my development manager is convinced having DVD drives are a thing of the past but still one came to my rescue today. Turns out if you want to load a third party RAID driver into windows setup you need to use one, slipstreaming an install is an option but if you aren’t sure what driver you need you go through an awful lot of cd’s.

Also got to use a dos boot disk today aswell, even edited a config.sys file (remember them? think games an not enough high memory and it’ll all come flooding back…).

Still we now have a dual AMD Opteron 250 and a Dell Power Edge 2850 running 64bit Windows 2003. We’ll see how the hardware stands up to what we’re throwing at it.