Subj : Re: What to do with a gia To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Sat Sep 12 2020 21:12:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > > KM> I've inherited a PowerEdge R510 server! great whopping rackmount > KM> type monster, dual Xeon, 64GB RAM, 12 drive bays, all full (8 3TB > KM> SAS, 4 480GB SATA SSDs which will be used to upgrade other > KM> stuff). No OS, cuz it was using some cloud OS from which it's now > KM> disconnected. And what I ended up doing was cannibalizing it... had a loose newer Xeon CPU, had a Lenovo S30 workstation motherboard that uses this very CPU fall on my head; it supports both SAS hard drives and 64GB ECC RAM... and uses about a third the electricity for the same net horsepower. And since it's a Xeon and I've already used Xorro as a name, it became Fireball, as in XL-5 (it's fast, it has an X, isn't logic wonderful? :) And then we had a HUGE argument getting any Windows before Win10 to install. The Lenovo board has an embedded Win10 license. (It shipped with Win7; how it acquired this is a mystery. Maybe that "free" upgrade.) It LOVES Win10. I do not. Win10 is what sent me screaming off to linux. Win10 ate my old external HD. Win10 is on my $#!+ List. Win8.1 Enterprise would not install. Win8 Embedded installs, but runs very poorly, and is very annoying. (Enterprise, which came to me on a freebie laptop, evidently has had considerable behavior modification, as it is much more polite than the consumer edition.) Win7 would not install, tho a portable Win7 install runs fine. (Not sure why this Win7Ultimate of uncertain provenance is portable, but it is. Just stick it in anything, and it runs.) Better than on Silver, actually, where it's decided NVMes are not in its future. I really wanted Fireball to run XP64, because its intended job is Poor Man's NAS, for which it needs to network gracefully and without argument. XP64 does that, and is 100% stable. But oh lordy, the ways the install found to fail.. got some help from Lenovo support but turns out if you slipstream the I/O driver, XP64 then rejects its own embedded serial number. After numerous fails I finally gave up and switched SATA to from UEFI to Legacy... and then we had a different set of fails, until one attempt became confused and used the previous failed install as its starting point -- and THEN it installed. And runs fine. I am now terrified of having to repeat this arcane procedure which no one understands, and have made three copies of the relevant hard drive. BUT... still looking for the relevant SAS driver.. the XP driver on Lenovo's site is the wrong one (tho their Win7 driver works). Meanwhile, could not get Win7 on Silver to play nice with the NVMe (the driver made Win7 throw up all over itself) but the NVMe works fine with XP64. WTF. Well, I guess I just swap their OSs. And get to use my preferred XP for everyday. Unless someone can show me how to get linux to gracefully allow network access to its precious hard drives... PCLOS runs lovely on both of 'em, but it's very annoying to be stuck with only ONE network drive that it will access (I don't know how I did that, either) and refusing to let anyone else see its own naughty bits. Oh... and never ever not EVER change the "use optimized defaults" setting on a Lenovo. If it ain't broke, don't touch it. You Have Been Warned. If you change it (hoping to fool the desired OS into installing, because Lenovo Support suggested looking at this setting) and if your vidcard is not BRAND FREAKIN' NEW, you will experience an apparently-bricked system, until you try a BRAND FREAKIN' NEW vidcard out of sheer desperation. (Well, new enough to know newfangled BIOS stuff, anyway.) Per Lenovo Support, the function comes factory-preset to Do Certain Settings, and if it disagrees with any bit of hardware, the result Does Not Work. And how was YOUR day? :D þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .