Yeah, the new hardware arrived. Here I write down, what I do. It is always usefull, to read up, how one has installed something the first time. Additionally, I hope that this log is also usefull for you.
Many things have to be installed for speedy. One should always do some planning before setting up a new computer. Here you see what lies ahead of me:
As you can see, the whole installation process consists of two phases: First the hardware, second the software. Though the list contains only two items concerning the software, it will for sure take more time. What exactly has to be done in the software phase will be decided on the fly. Some general preparations have to be made for the software, but then, planning can be done later. This is, because it is easy to install new packages into a debian system.
For linux, the preparations are simple: I downloaded two ISO CD images for debian 4.0r0 ia64. The first is the buisinesscard image. This one should work. It contains a very minimal system which can configure the hardware so far, that debian can be downloaded through the network. (I have a LAN with a router with DHCP support, so configuration of the internet access is very easy.) To be sure, I also downloaded the netinstall image. It contains a more complete but still very minimal system which should be able to connect to the internet in more problematic cases.
If something goes wrong (especially with the bootloader, because the windows installer always overwrites the bootsector), I have ready a linux system which can be booted from CD. I.e. I downloaded a CD image of KNOPPIX V5.1.1 DE. It is generally a good idea to always have a copy of KNOPPIX lying around.
Burning these three images to three CD ROMs finishes the preperations for Linux. Now go over to windows.
All installation CDs of all windows software are ready. One has to make sure to know all product IDs the microsoft installer asks for. (If there are some of them missing, they can usually be looked up by currently installed software. This is usefull in my case, because I am UPDATING the hardware.)
It can be, that I won't do a windows installation at all and simply take over my current installation of windows onto a partition on the new harddisk. I'm not going to copy the image of the current partition, because I will change partition sizes. I'll have to copy the files one by one, but I think this will work (even with linux, which should be able to write NTFS easily by now (perhaps)).
The really first thing one has to do is to check whether all of the byed is inside the big cartons. So I go through the item list and check whether the piece in questions is complete and visually in a good state. So here the list, what I have: