Windows 2003 installation on a naked Dell 1850 w/o floppy

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Hi folks,

I am desperate in need of help right now.

I got a naked Dell PowerEdge 1850 server w/o floppy drive days ago and
I tried to install Windows 2003 server standard edition on it. When the
CD boots up, I need to use F6 to install Perc 4e/si driver since the
harddrives are SCSI raid unknown by Windows automatically.

This requires loading the driver files from the floppy and the
installation does not allow other locations. Since the server does not
have a floppy drive, I formatted a USB pen drive into FAT and copy the
SCSI driver files over using HP Drive Key Utility, then I changed the
BIOS to emulate the USB device as a floppy. After a few trial and
errors, the installation program reads the USB pen drive as a floppy
but it says that it cannot find 'txtsetup.oem' file. I downloaded the
driver files from Dell and make sure all the files including
'txtsetup.oem' are on the USB already but it stills gives an error. So
would anybody please help me about it?

As an alternative approach, I create a USB bootable pen drive from a
MS-DOS image. The machine boots from USB pen OK and also make a virtual
floppy drive in the memory, where I have put the SCSI driver files.
Also it recognizes the CDROM and assigns it as X: drive. So I go to X:
drive under DOS and get into i386 folder, and type in WINNT.exe which
is supposed to be the command-line installation program. A blue window
pops up asking for the Windows files, so I put in 'X:\i386'. The screen
says 'trying to find INF files ...', and it hangs there without reading
the CDROM.

Would anybody please help me see what I have done wrong? Is there any
other ways that I can do to install Win03 except buying an external
floppy drive?

Thanks in advance.

.

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