I was installing WSS 3.0 on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and got the following error.

Figure 1.

Clearly WSS 3.0 has issues with Windows Server 2008! Clicking on "Check for solutions online" displays the following screen.

Figure 2.

Clicking "Check online for a solution" takes to the following really helpful (sarcastic) screen.

Figure 3.

At this point I thought I can't install WSS, or MOSS for that matter, on Windows Server 2008! I tried again and this time around I paid more attention to the screens shown.

By default, the bottom portion of the screen shown in Figure 2 is hidden and I missed the detailed error information shown in the bottom portion of the screen. On the second screen, I clicked on "View problem details" and saw the detailed error information, as shown below.

The error description read:

You must install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with the most recent service pack. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 without service packs has a known compatibility issue with this version of Windows.

I downloaded and installed the newly released Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP1 installation instead and it worked like a charm.

Note that you have to download the complete installation of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1, instead of downloading only the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1) which is intended to be installed on existing WSS 3.0 installations.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to install Windows Server 2008 on a VM. I thought I will list down the steps that I went through to install the next version on Windows server. The installation is pretty straight forward and I did not face any issues @ all.

I booted my new VM using the Windows Server ISO file. The following screen was shown after starting the VM.

Choose the language, time/currency and input method.

Click Next to go to the following screen.

For some reason, clicking Install Now made me wait longer than usual, or maybe I am way too excited about using this puppy :)

Finally the following screen is shown which let me chose the OS that I wanted to install. As you can see there are different versions of this product; go to Windows Server 2008 - Overview of Editions to learn more about different versions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree and accept.

Clicking Next took to the following screen. Of course the Upgrade option was disabled because I was installing this OS on a clean VM.

Next screen gave me an opportunity to setup my partitions. I did not do anything here and just clicked on Next.

Clicking Next started the final process of copying/installing files.

During the installation, the machine was restarted and I missed the opportunity to capture that screen. Following screens are shown after the restart.

Completing installation …

After completing the installation, the VM was restarted again and the following screen was shown. I don't remember entering the Administrator password during the installation; that means this has changed from Windows Server 2003 where it used to ask for the Administrator password during the installation.

Clicking on OK took me to the following screen.

New and confirm password were provided and I was taken to the following screen after the password was changed successfully.

Clicking OK prepares my desktop and logs me into THE SERVER!

I really can't wait to explore this server, specially IIS 7.0 and its developer features.