(no subject)
May. 6th, 2006 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogYet more ramblings that are most likely of interest only to other computer geeks.
So a Dell Precision 370 workstation managed to follow![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
serinthia and I home from work on her first day with me at my job. After bringing it by she and Todd's place for them to look over, it was set on my workbench, where it sat the rest of the night as Moira and I ate dinner, and then Todd and Serin came by for Dance Dance (which was much fun by the way; thanks for coming by you two!).
This morning, after lazily awaking and finally dragging myself out of bed, I plugged it in to some peripherals, fired it up, and started playing with it. As it turns out, there wasn't a problem with the onboard RAID controller as the individual who had dropped it off with the help desk at work had claimed; instead, it looks to me like it's just that one of the hard drives has gone bad. In fact, I even looked it up on their website and it's still under next business day warranty, so all I should have to do is call up Dell and have them send out a hard drive to me; I'll probably tackle that later this week. The reason we didn't do anything with it at the help desk is that's it's not our corporate standard hardware so we don't support it. Another division had purchased the computer without going through us. Bad user! I explained that they'd have to purchase a machine that was in standard or it would be too much effort on our part to track down all the necessary ephemera to make it hum and beep again. Since then, now several months ago, it had been sitting in the corner of the room. Finally, my team lead just told me to make it disappear. Which I happily did.
But back to my primary narrative. So after breaking the RAID-1 (degraded by the one bad drive) mirror the drives were in, I popped in the Windows XP disc I have and tried to install the OS. I got as far as the beginning of the GUI portion and got the old "no available hard drives message". Ok fine; I just have to find a driver for the onboard SATA RAID controller and tell the installer where to find it. I have the same issue with the SATA on the ABIT NF7-S board on my primary computer. I'll just go over to Dell's website and grab the drivers for it.
I downloaded both of the listed storage device drivers and tried to tell the XP setup interface where to find them on the A drive. No dice. Windows goes out and looks at the floppy drive and finds nothing. Fine. I started looking around the internet for alternative drivers for the SATA device, the Intel Application Accelerator, RAID edition. Zip. There's just nothing out there that I can find. Ive searched around the Dell sites and forums to see if anyone has written about a solution for getting XP to recognize the SATA drives right from boot, but the best I've found is this thread.
I've learned a lot about Dell computers that I didn't know before. I didn't know that they put a 3GB hidden partition on their hard drives and build access to a Norton Ghost-based system restore utility within it into the BIOS menu so that you can restore your system to factory software config via BIOS. That's pretty cool. Unfortunately, that partition is long gone, and it wasn't even me who got rid of it. I'm sure that was blown away when work configured it for whatever they were doing with it.
So it looks like I could call up Dell support and fight with a couple of Indian phone reps to get them to send me an OS CD. I might even do that later, at the same time that I call and make them send me a replacement 40GB SATA drive. But for now, I'm going to use a trick that I've had to use before on a machine that had a SCSI based RAID config that Windows 2000 couldn't see. I'll install Windows 98.
Confused? So am I. But I found in that case, that booting via a 98 boot disk, partitioning and formatting the hard drive through Fdisk, and then installing Windows 98 worked just fine. Why can a nearly ten year old OS see non-IDE storage devices whereas Microsoft's newest consumer OS (not counting Vista since it's not officially out yet) NOT see them? I don't know. Maybe, just maybe, 98 is using the BIOS on the motherboard to access the drives whereas 2000 and above use their own software and can't let the BIOS, which knows how to do it on it's own, control the process? I really don't know. If anyone else reading this does, I'd love to be enlightened.
So, back to my Precision 370: so far it's worked. I got 98 installed and booted. For some reason it won't boot regularly; I have to do it in safe mode. But I can at least boot. Of course, safe mode has no CD access, so I booted up from the 98 boot floppy again and am right now awaiting the last file transfer that will see all of the install files for 2000 and XP safely ensconced on the hard drive. Then, I'll boot into 98's safe mode and try installing XP. If that doesn't work, I'll install 2000, and then XP. And if that doesn't work, I'll start 98 in step by step mode and figure out what's keeping it from booting regularly. Then, I'll go through the process again.
If that doesn't work? Well, maybe I'll just have to wait for Dell to send me an OS CD. I have a feeling though, that if it comes to that, I can think of something. I do so hate waiting....
I actually snagged this machine for my brother. Considering he's got a 900Mhz Athlon Thunderbird that seems to be on it's last legs, and this new machine is a 2.8Ghz Pentium, it should be a significant improvement. Not only will it be the fastest computer at my parents' house, but it will be about one and a half times as fast as mine. I've been telling him I'll try to grab him something from work so he can keep up with the games that our family and friends have, so it makes me happy to have found something for him even better than I expected. Maybe I can finally get him to play Final Fantasy XI with me.
So a Dell Precision 370 workstation managed to follow
serinthia and I home from work on her first day with me at my job. After bringing it by she and Todd's place for them to look over, it was set on my workbench, where it sat the rest of the night as Moira and I ate dinner, and then Todd and Serin came by for Dance Dance (which was much fun by the way; thanks for coming by you two!).This morning, after lazily awaking and finally dragging myself out of bed, I plugged it in to some peripherals, fired it up, and started playing with it. As it turns out, there wasn't a problem with the onboard RAID controller as the individual who had dropped it off with the help desk at work had claimed; instead, it looks to me like it's just that one of the hard drives has gone bad. In fact, I even looked it up on their website and it's still under next business day warranty, so all I should have to do is call up Dell and have them send out a hard drive to me; I'll probably tackle that later this week. The reason we didn't do anything with it at the help desk is that's it's not our corporate standard hardware so we don't support it. Another division had purchased the computer without going through us. Bad user! I explained that they'd have to purchase a machine that was in standard or it would be too much effort on our part to track down all the necessary ephemera to make it hum and beep again. Since then, now several months ago, it had been sitting in the corner of the room. Finally, my team lead just told me to make it disappear. Which I happily did.
But back to my primary narrative. So after breaking the RAID-1 (degraded by the one bad drive) mirror the drives were in, I popped in the Windows XP disc I have and tried to install the OS. I got as far as the beginning of the GUI portion and got the old "no available hard drives message". Ok fine; I just have to find a driver for the onboard SATA RAID controller and tell the installer where to find it. I have the same issue with the SATA on the ABIT NF7-S board on my primary computer. I'll just go over to Dell's website and grab the drivers for it.
I downloaded both of the listed storage device drivers and tried to tell the XP setup interface where to find them on the A drive. No dice. Windows goes out and looks at the floppy drive and finds nothing. Fine. I started looking around the internet for alternative drivers for the SATA device, the Intel Application Accelerator, RAID edition. Zip. There's just nothing out there that I can find. Ive searched around the Dell sites and forums to see if anyone has written about a solution for getting XP to recognize the SATA drives right from boot, but the best I've found is this thread.
I've learned a lot about Dell computers that I didn't know before. I didn't know that they put a 3GB hidden partition on their hard drives and build access to a Norton Ghost-based system restore utility within it into the BIOS menu so that you can restore your system to factory software config via BIOS. That's pretty cool. Unfortunately, that partition is long gone, and it wasn't even me who got rid of it. I'm sure that was blown away when work configured it for whatever they were doing with it.
So it looks like I could call up Dell support and fight with a couple of Indian phone reps to get them to send me an OS CD. I might even do that later, at the same time that I call and make them send me a replacement 40GB SATA drive. But for now, I'm going to use a trick that I've had to use before on a machine that had a SCSI based RAID config that Windows 2000 couldn't see. I'll install Windows 98.
Confused? So am I. But I found in that case, that booting via a 98 boot disk, partitioning and formatting the hard drive through Fdisk, and then installing Windows 98 worked just fine. Why can a nearly ten year old OS see non-IDE storage devices whereas Microsoft's newest consumer OS (not counting Vista since it's not officially out yet) NOT see them? I don't know. Maybe, just maybe, 98 is using the BIOS on the motherboard to access the drives whereas 2000 and above use their own software and can't let the BIOS, which knows how to do it on it's own, control the process? I really don't know. If anyone else reading this does, I'd love to be enlightened.
So, back to my Precision 370: so far it's worked. I got 98 installed and booted. For some reason it won't boot regularly; I have to do it in safe mode. But I can at least boot. Of course, safe mode has no CD access, so I booted up from the 98 boot floppy again and am right now awaiting the last file transfer that will see all of the install files for 2000 and XP safely ensconced on the hard drive. Then, I'll boot into 98's safe mode and try installing XP. If that doesn't work, I'll install 2000, and then XP. And if that doesn't work, I'll start 98 in step by step mode and figure out what's keeping it from booting regularly. Then, I'll go through the process again.
If that doesn't work? Well, maybe I'll just have to wait for Dell to send me an OS CD. I have a feeling though, that if it comes to that, I can think of something. I do so hate waiting....
I actually snagged this machine for my brother. Considering he's got a 900Mhz Athlon Thunderbird that seems to be on it's last legs, and this new machine is a 2.8Ghz Pentium, it should be a significant improvement. Not only will it be the fastest computer at my parents' house, but it will be about one and a half times as fast as mine. I've been telling him I'll try to grab him something from work so he can keep up with the games that our family and friends have, so it makes me happy to have found something for him even better than I expected. Maybe I can finally get him to play Final Fantasy XI with me.
