Hardware Requirements
The first major difference between the Windows 2000 and 9x installation processes that the administrator or technician will first encounter is the hardware requirements for the two operating systems. Windows 2000 is a much more robust operating system and has many more features than the 9x operating system. Therefore it requires a much more powerful computer and hardware capable of handling the operating system without it running too slow or crashing.

Note: This chapter refers to system administrator more often than to technician because Windows 2000 is more likely to run in a networked environment, whereby the system administrator is the one who attends to most of the problems that occur.

The Windows 9x hardware requires an 80486/66 system with at least 16 MB of RAM. The system should also have a modem and a 16-color VGA monitor. The hard drive needs to have at least between 120 and 355 MB of free space to successfully install Windows 98 (Windows 9x installation is more thoroughly discussed in Chapter 5). To successfully install and run Windows 2000, the computer system will require more of a hardware upgrade. This is discussed later in this chapter in the section, "Requirements for Installing Windows 2000".

Partitioning and Formatting
It is important to become familiar with partitioning and formatting when performing operating system installations. Partitioning and formatting the hard drive prepares it for the operating system installation. When installing one of the 9x operating systems, the hard drive must be partitioned with either the fdisk.exe utility or with a third party utility like Partition Magic. Then the operating system can be installed from the installation CD. Hard drive partitioning for Windows 9x installation is more thoroughly discussed in Chapter 5, "Windows 9x Operating Systems". Windows 2000 provides an easy way to do hard drive preparation for OS installation. The administrator can take an unformatted, unpartitioned hard drive and begin installing Windows 2000. While going through the setup process there will be prompts to select which partition to install the operating system on and if there are no partitions, they can be created by the Setup program.

There will then be a prompt to format the partition if it has just been created, or the partition can be reformatted if one already exists.

Device Drivers
Device drivers play an important role in any operating system whether it is Windows 9x or 2000. Simply stated, if the computer does not have the proper device drivers, the system will not run or sometimes will not even boot up. This is an area where Windows 2000 has a definite advantage. First, it is necessary to have a completely different set of drivers depending on whether Windows 9x or 2000 is being installed. This is because the two internal structures of the two operating systems are so different. For example, a piece of hardware can be installed in a system running Windows 98 and then the proper device driver can be loaded and it will work fine. The same piece of hardware installed in a system running Windows 2000 with the same driver will not work. This is why companies always have multiple types of drivers for one piece of hardware.

The main advantage that Windows 2000 has, when compared with Windows 9x, is the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). The HAL is a library of hardware drivers that operate between the operating system and hardware that is installed on the system. The HAL enables Windows 2000 to work with many different types of processors from different manufactures. This feature frees Windows 2000 from interacting with the hardware as it does in Windows 9x. Instead, the HAL controls all direct access for system hardware operations, providing the operating system with expanded hardware compatibility. The HAL is what makes Windows 2000 a NOS, as compared to Windows 9x, which is not.

Windows 2000 Features
While installing Windows 2000 there are a few other features that are unique to the operating system and are not found in the Windows 9x installation process. One option when installing Windows 2000 is whether to add the computer to a domain or workgroup. If the computer is to be added to the domain, an account will have to be made for the computer in the domain. Another important feature that a systems administrator must keep in mind when doing Windows 2000 installations is the Client Access License (CAL). CAL gives client computers the right to connect to computers running the Windows 2000 server so that the client computers can connect to network services, shared folders, and print resources.
 

Lab Activity  (PDF, 118 KB)   In this lab, students will learn how to install and run through a Windows 2000 installation step by step.