SOLVED Win 2012 server experiment

I own an old HP Media center m376n and I want to re-image it to Windows Server, I have a copy of 2012 R2. I wrote the ISO file to a 16gb thumb drive in a boot-able format, when I try to boot to re-image the HP media center it says there's a boot error, just for trying sake I took the thumb drive to my buddy's place and ran it on his computer, imaged just fine... My computer wont have anything to do with it though. Just for reference I have already tried:
-updating the BIOS
-setting the thumb drive as the primary boot device
(both before and after update)
-writing the ISO to a disk and booting the disk, setting disk as primary boot device when trying
-booting using the RT edition off TechNet
-putting the ISO file on an existing server and booting the Media Center PC from LAN
-taking the hard drive from the Media Center PC and plugging it into my laptop as a USB device and writing the image onto it

Also the computer is running a Pentium 4 and currently on XP

Is it old enough that it isn't a 64bit P4? Do you know which CPU exactly is in there? IIRC 2012 is 64bit only.

x86 family: 15 model: 2 stepping: 9, ~2600Mhz
It isn't capable of running 64bit

so now recommendation on what to do with this pc to get It to run win server or is it hopeless?

I'd just run server 2003... Or linux. What are you trying to get it to do that it won't do on XP? What feature of 2012 do you need?

The best server OS you can install is Server 2008 not R2. Everything post Server 2008 is 64-bit only.

Truthfully the P4 era is a bit long in the tooth to do any real work these days. Pfsense box for a small home maybe.

Im doing a project for a web design class and I need to run some kind of web host, I really like the IIS function of 2012 and combined with the GUI its really nice. I also want to set up to run dhcp and dns through my work shop so I can keep the different images and software I use to fix computers on the Lan instead of having a huge disk collection

Brimw234 said:

Im doing a project for a web design class and I need to run some kind of web host, I really like the IIS function of 2012 and combined with the GUI its really nice. I also want to set up to run dhcp and dns through my work shop so I can keep the different images and software I use to fix computers on the Lan instead of having a huge disk collection

Click to expand...

Why do you want to run DNS and DHCP through a server platform as opposed to your router?

IIS does come with Server 2008 (non R2) or Server 2003 and you will get a whack of updates to bring it up to IIS 7.0

But really - if you only need a web server almost (maybe even all?) flavours of *nix will happily run apache - it's not as pretty but it gets the job done. Web Servers (Especially personal ones) are most of the time set and forget.

Server 2012 would be great, but given your hardware limitations I would recommend downloading Ubuntu Server edition. You can (unless they've changed it) select the uses you'll make of it when you install, and you'll want to select 'Web Server'. Let it take you through the install and you're half-way home.

Then you "cd /var/www" and that's where your web-pages live.

If GNU/Linux seems a bit daunting because you're just used to Windows, what edition do you run on your normal computer? You can install IIS locally on some editions (Apache too, if you need to, though that's rare to install on Windows) and you can actually have your main computer be both host and client. Virtual Box is also free and can create a "server" on your computer.

Not trying to discourage you from setting up this box as a server at all! Just offering suggestions if it can't work out the way you want it to.