Windows Small Business Server 2003 comes on CD and DVD. If your server has a DVD drive in it, you won t be prompted to swap CDs all the files needed are on the DVD media. If you don t have a DVD drive in your system, you ll need to use the CDs instead and you will have to swap them out when prompted. More advanced network administrators might want to copy the CDs to the server hard drive (create flat file copies) to avoid the CD swap and allow the installation to proceed with less user intervention. If you don t know that any of that means, don t worry, just be ready to swap a few CDs during the install.

The installation has two major phases the installation of the system files and the setup of the SBS specific elements (Active Directory, Exchange Server, etc.). The first major phase is also divided into two phases text mode and graphical user interface (GUI) mode. In text mode, the system boots from the SBS CD Disk 1. You select the disk partition and then some very basic files are installed that are needed to work with the hard disk and to continue the installation. The computer will reboot into the next phase, the GUI-based setup, which looks like the Windows interface you re familiar with. This phase loads and runs a modified version of the Windows Server 2003 operating system. During this phase, the setup program will detect and install...