Introduction

Had a chance to install 9 operating systems on HP G6 Proliant DL380 servers. 4 of them had to be Windows 2003 64bit and 5x32bit. To summarize, 64bit versions didn’t boot after SmartStart initiated installation (NTLDR not found) and 32bit version went okay until we found nothing HP-related in the start menu of Windows 2003. And we had to do a manual install of PSP on each and every server we had. Quite a tedious work, as you can imagine. So it’s more like a ‘dumb’ start, rather than being anything close to word ‘smart’.

Technical information

Version of Windows: 2003 R2 VL x64 and x86.
Version of SmartStart: one that came in G6 box, which is 8.2.

Conclusion

Don’t waste your time bothering with SmartStart installation. In the best case you will benefit from having to enter admin data only once in the beginning to installation, which is good for multitasking. In the worst case, however (and a more common one), you will need to install the OS from scratch having found you already wasted an hour or half. Besides, manual installation of PSP doesn’t take much of your time after it’s started. Yes, it’s automatic and it’s reported to take ~30 minutes. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do exact measurements, but certainly it’s a breathing room for other tasks.