Windows 2000 unveiled

Windows 2000 Installation

i.   Introduction

Windows 2000 has been one of those highly anticipated things that people have waited for, hoped for, and even desperately desired. Back when it was code-named Cairo, the development of the Active Directory structure and the eventual inclusion of plug-and-play support excited many users and their IT managers.

 As time went on, these same people gradually lost their enthusiasm for this latest Microsoft product.  Part of it was due to all the changes Microsoft made and the resulting delays.  In reality, Windows NT 6.0 was supposed to be the OS called Windows 2000, considering that Microsoft was supposed to release NT 5.0 in early 1999.  When NT6, Windows 2000 at that point, entered the scene, it was to be the final merging of the consumer OS (Win98) and the corporate OS (NT) into an OS both could and would use. With the delayed release of NT5 due to its massive code rewrite, Microsoft marketing decided to rename NT5 as Windows 2000 and include some features not expected to arrive until NT6, such as DirectX 7 and USB support.  In fact, even after NT5's name was changed to Windows 2000, it was supposed to only include DirectX 5.0 support, with DirectX 7 coming in Service Pack 1.

 However, that has all changed now.  Windows 2000 is shipping with greatly-improved home and enterprise features such as plug-and-play support, USB support, DirectX 7, Active Directory, greatly reduced number of required reboots, and along with DataCenter Server comes support for up to 32 CPUs.  Microsoft added to the confusion by splitting. Windows 2000 into 4 different products, naming them differently than their. Windows NT 4 equivalents:  Windows 2000 Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and DataCenter Server.

Even though many of you could easily recite the differences, here they are in a quick nutshell:

Professional - for desktop and workstation use.  Optimized for graphical response and user interaction speed.  Supports 1 or 2 CPUs.

Server - optimized for data I/O and routing speed.  Includes extra server-oriented services. Supports up to 4 CPUs and 4GB of RAM.

Advanced Server - much like Server, except there are a few added utilities and services for database hosting, such as clustering.  Adds support for up to 8 CPUs and 8GB of  RAM.

DataCenter Server - built with scalability in mind for massive implementations.  Adds on to the features in Advanced Server for extensive server support.  Supports up to 32 CPUs.  Expected availability in May 2000.

ii.   Installation

 Installing Windows 2000 was, as you may have heard, quite time intensive.  Of the four installations performed, the average time was well into two hours apiece.  A normal, fresh installation is the fastest, although it can be time consuming to create the NTFS or FAT32 partition.  Even though the installation takes more time, it requires less user interaction than any previous Microsoft OS installations.  Simply start the installation, prepare the partition, and let it copy.  User input will be required for the registered user name, a valid login, computer name, networking options, and a few other small items such as those, but once that's done, the system goes back to creating all the links and dependencies, Start Menu items, and finally finishes and boots up.

 One note of warning--be patient.  There are several points in the install where the status bar might stop for 5 or 10 minutes.  Just keep waiting and let it run.  If it stays stopped for more than an hour, then reboot the machine and try to set up Windows 2000 again.

 We also tried an upgrade from Windows NT4 Workstation.  The upgrade itself went very smoothly, although the Start Menu and building dependencies sections took much longer than with a fresh install.  We was amazed at how well it preserved my NT4 installation configuration. Everything was the same except for the few visual differences between Windows 2000 and NT4. However, we immediately noticed that the system was very sluggish. 

We loaded the Windows Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC for those not in the know), and found that a process with a High priority was stealing almost all the CPU cycles.  It was svchost.exe, which is related to starting and maintaining certain services.  Because it is a system process, I could not kill it or lower its priority.  After trying many different things to try to get rid of it and looking through the Microsoft Knowledge Base, we eventually chalked it up to experience and gave up.

 Something else we found was that, when setting up the system, because we had only used one CPU in the Shuttle HOT-649A (a dual Slot 1 motherboard), Windows 2000 configured it as an MPS Uniprocessor PC rather than an MPS Multiprocessor PC type.  In order to get full support for dual CPUs, we went into the Device Manager to change the computer type.  While changing the type, we noticed that we weren't currently using an ACPI-based Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), so we thought, "Why not kill two birds with one stone?"  Big mistake: the system never booted all the way after that. Duh! What a mess.

 We searched the Microsoft Knowledge base, and found that it is strongly discouraged to switch from ACPI to non-ACPI or vice versa.  They suggested that to do this change, run setup as an upgrade and have ACPI enabled or disabled in BIOS to get the proper files installed.  This is because several drivers and services depend on whether or not the system kernel supports ACPI.  If it does, then different versions of those drivers and services need to be installed.   Because of the fact that simply changing the computer type does not switch driver or service files, it is not recommended to switch across the "ACPI barrier" without running setup.

 In an attempt to recover, we booted to the Windows 2000 Setup CD and tried a repair without using the Emergency Repair disks.  Selecting this option brings up the Windows 2000 Recovery Console.  It sounds cool, but it's basically like booting to a Windows 98 Safe Mode Command Line.  Most major DOS commands are supported, and using them, you can replace or edit whatever files you need to.

When we discovered that, I was impressed that Microsoft added such a feature, but we realized how long it would take to recover the system and that we didn't want or need to spend that time attempting to recover a setup that would likely still have an overly-hungry svchost.exe.   So from there, we just deleted the NTFS partition and started over from scratch. We went through a fresh install and everything worked as expected.

It is possible to skip all the mistakes we made with one simple change.  The Microsoft Knowledge Base offers instructions describing how to change to a specific HAL during setup.  By doing that, you can put yourself on the right foot from the outset of the installation.

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