[Today's post comes to us courtesy of John Bay and Wayne Gordon McIntyre from Commercial Technical Support]
The installation of Small Business Server 2011 Essentials may hang at the “Please wait while installation continues” screen:
At this point of the installation, setup is attempting to configure the network and acquire an IP address from a DHCP server. If it is unable to acquire an IP address from a DHCP server, the process will appear to hang.
You can press the Shift key in combination with the F10 key on the keyboard to launch a command prompt window. Use the ipconfig command to verify the IP address information of the server.
If the server has a 169.254.x.x address, then the server has not received an address from a DHCP server. You should make sure a DHCP server is properly configured and located on the same network segment as the SBS 2011 Essentials server. Sometimes it is necessary to disconnect the network card of the SBS 2011 Essentials server and reconnect it. Once the server has acquired an IP address, the setup should move automatically to the following screen:
If there is no DHCP server located on the network segment, you can use the following netsh command to assign a static IP address to the SBS 2011 Essentials server:
netsh interface ip set address " interface name " static ipaddr subnetmask gateway metric
Note: The interface name is obtained from the output of ipconfig (see above example).
The following example will configure the “Local Area Connection” interface on the server with a static IP address of 192.168.0.2, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, and a default gateway of 192.168.0.1
netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection" static 192.168.0.2 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1 1
For additional information on the netsh utility see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc778503(WS.10).aspx
Once you set the IP address using the netsh command, you may need to disconnect the network cable from the network card and reconnect it to force the setup process to continue.