Month: May 2009

Dell R300 painful Windows 2003 x64 install

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Received a new Dell R300 2.8Ghz Quad Core, 8GB RAM, 2x500GB SATA drives, PERC RAID controller and needed to install Windows 2003 x64.  The CD/DVD (“Systems Management Tools and Documentation Version 5.5”) that comes with the Dell systems allows you to boot into the “Dell Systems Build and Update Utility” so that you can install an operating system.

The pain came when inserting the DVD into the drive it would not boot off the DVD and the system would just keep complaining about no operating system.

So, testing with the Windows 2003 x64 media it starts booting fine… until, needing to install the PERC drivers from a floppy.  No floppy in the system.

Dell support ask me to download the 5.3 version of the CD, which, after an hour of downloading turns out to boot and then say “platform not supported”.

Dell support asked me to  download their USBkeyprep util to create a driver usb key stick which would allow manually installing windows… however, trying to run the application errored with: Error processing the command line parameters

Called Dell support again and was on hold for quite a while… during this time I wondered if the media shipped with the system would boot via an external USB CD/DVD drive.  It turns out that it started to boot up fine.  It allowed me to go through the install process and hopefully Windows 2003 x64 will be installed.

Can’t work out why the DVD would boot on an external drive, but, not on the internal DVD drive… but, the internal DVD drive booted the windows CD?  Even specifically selecting boot from optical device from the F11 boot menu didn’t help.  Possibly something wrong with the Dell CD/DVD drive?

Ubuntu software RAID primary disk failure

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OS: Ubuntu 6.06
Setup: 2 disks RAID 1.  3 partitions, 2 of which are md devices.
Problem:Primary disk failure with grub 25 error and bad sectors

Machine was not booting past grub 1.5 and was saying “Error 25”.

Grub error code 25:

 25 : Disk read error: This error is returned if there is a disk read error when trying to probe or read data from a particular disk.

Basically the primary disk was wasted, but, the second disk wouldn’t boot because the primary disk was active enough to start up grub stage 1.5… and fail.

Booted up with the Ubuntu 6.06 CDROM and selected rescue.  Setup networking and then was given an option to try and start a shell on any of the partitions.

Although disk0 was the faulty disk it was not possible to mount any of the disk1 partitions and it gave an error.

Was able to mount the root partition on the faulty disk and use a shell from the rescue disk.

Ran fsck.ext3  on /dev/hdc1, /dev/hdc3 and corrected any errors on the partitions.

In the shell it was possible to mount the mdX raid devices, but, not the individual /dev/hdcX devices as they were already in use.  “cat /proc/mdstat” showed that hdc was being used by the md0/md1 devices.

Mounted the file systems on the secondary disk with:

mount /dev/md1 /mnt
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/boot
chroot /mnt

Then ran grub and following commands:

grub>device (hd0) /dev/hdc
grub>root (hd0,0)
grub>setup (hd0)
grub>quit

Now, grub was definately installed on the second disk but on reboot it would still boot off the first disk.  Removed the partition table from the faulty disk0 using fdisk and rebooted and the system booted up fine other than numerous hda disk errors.

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