I have inherited a Dell PowerEdge R410 and no disks. I have downloaded the Dell Systems Build and Update Utility for the R410 and booted from the optical drive. In the management console you have the option to deploy and O/S which is what I have done, selected Windows Server 2003 and then all seems okay, until I have received a pop-up saying "missing CD/DVD Drivers".
I have downloaded all drivers from the Dell website and thrown them onto a USB. When I have selected the location for these nothing appears to be recognised. I'm at a loss as to how to move forward with getting an O/S onto the server and any advise would be appreciated.
with w2k3 if you need additional drivers not provide by the oem on the install cd you'll need to have a floppy disk then hit f5/6 can't remember during the install and it will use the drivers found on the floppy.
Assuming that you have already configured a RAID array on your new drives, you can boot and install directly from the installation media without using the Dell utilities. Depending on your BIOS settings, you may need to press F12 at boot to specify CD or USB. Because your version of Windows is much older than your hardware, you should be prepared to provide a third-party RAID driver if your contoller is not recognized. This driver can be downloaded from support.dell.com.
If you are having trouble installing Server 2003 from the optical drive, you certainly can install Windows Server 2003 directly from your USB device by following this tutorial.
Are you sure that you want to be installing an outdated OS on contemporary hardware? It might make more sense to install Server 2008 R2 (or the free MS Hyper-V Server, or VMware ESXi) and then set up Server 2003 in a virtual machine. Any of the above will recognize your hardware out of the box, while providing provide a layer of abstraction that should eliminate the usual driver issues that one expects when installing old OS software on new hardware.