HOWTO: Installing SQL 6.5 On Windows 2000 Server

You may have a requirement that you cannot change where you have old
apps, such as Delphi 3 apps (in my case), that must hobble along until
the BIG migration money comes into migrate to something better. And
those old apps may require that you keep SQL 6.5 on the backend. In my
case, that's the case, unfortunately. And Microsoft has completely
dried up support for it.

You may find that you can't install SQL 6.5 Enterprise Edition on
Windows 2000 Server -- it may say that it needs to be NT 4 Enterprise
Edition. I did some testing and have come up with the hook around this
problem:

1. Copy the contents of the SQL 6.5 Ent Edition CD to your hard drive.
You're going to need a lot of space.

2. Edit the i386setup.inf file (once you have made it not read-only)
and find the lines that refer to an if/then statement about "EntOnly"
(note no space before Only). When you find this if/then statement,
comment that block (about 5 lines, if not mistaken) out by putting
semicolons as the first character on each line.

3. Now run the install by doing something like E:i386msetup.exe, if
E: is your hard drive where you have installed the files copied from
CD. It will run without complaining about the NT 4.