Kosh's Web Log

Well it didn’t come with a manual, but after searching I found that you can’t install anything to the MBR, or it fubar’s the system partition.

I tried to “fix” the partition, but the smartstart CD said that it couldn’t access the system partition to restore it.

Isn’t that the point of restoring it ?

So, Another system erase later, we have a Linux booting Compaq Proliant 1850R with a working system partition (and a disabled F1 prompt, yay !)

On a sidenote, It seems not to be able to shutdown, I have read that alot of people have been having this problem, I am “investigating” it now, hopefully I will have an answer in a few hours (I do have work to do as well)

I think that compaq was designed by the devil, for the devil.

I also think that there needs to be somewhere where it is mentioned that you need to put the image “boot144a.dat” onto floppy for this process to work.

I’ve downloaded the specific floppy images from HP’s site, and they all illegal exceptioned.
I ran them up in DOSbox but a few of them required direct IO to the floppy to write the images, well so far “all” of them did, but two of them expanded the images, then showed a “ack, cannont comply” message, at which point I used explorer to copy/paste/rename the expanded file then rawrite to write them to floppy.
(once you accept the “ack, cannot comply” message it deletes the expanded image)

But I have downloaded the “HP SmartStart CD”, and I made a floppy out of the boot144a.dat image, which booted then used the CD (so far) to do the rest.

Eventually I’ll have to get my network map up with the pictures of the machines I’m using.

Eventually.

Back to this “bane of my existence” server (once it’s working it’ll rock, and I could have run up windows on it about 20 times over …)