Hardware :: Time Machine And Mediasmart Server And Install

I have a couple older PC's and a late 2008 MBP (my first Mac - yes, I am a Mac noob). I use boot camp to run XP on the MBP and decided to use that for the initial set-up of the server. Things were going well until it was updating the server software. It ticked up to 18% and stalled. About 45 minutes later, I (wrongly) figured that I shouldn't have tried to use my MBP and stopped the update. I switched gears and tried to run it on my HP desktop. It did the same thing - went to 18% and stopped. After another 30+ minutes, I called HP, and waited and waited on hold. I was getting impatient and decided to run the HP server recovery disk. While that was running, I got through to HP (close to an hour on hold). The guy seemed knowledgeable and told me that the updates are stalling at 18%. He told me that they are hearing waits/stalls that average around 2 hours at the 18% figure. For anyone else with a new HP mediasmart server, learn from my lesson and be patient.

The HP rep told me that it should not be a problem to run the first install with a windows OS via boot camp. This is not true for something like parallels. In the end, I did get the install done through XP via boot camp. He also told me that they are seeing problems with people dedicating a space larger than 100 GB's for Time Machine. He said it works for some people for a while, but it inevitably fails. When it fails, he said they are finding that people have to run a full server recovery (you lose all of your data) to get TM running again. They have not been successful with just creating a new slot/space for TM. Has anyone else heard this?.......................