Category: Jake

If anybody locally is a HP/Compaq server wizard, please call me at my office, as I’m to the point where I’m going to pay somebody else to fix this if I can’t get ‘er working (emailing me is fine as well).

I have a server that is having trouble getting going. I migrated this DL380G1 server from a Proliant 800 (PIII model). I took the RAID card and SCSI drive out of the 800, installed it in the DL380, booted off the 800 drive, and it installed all the new drivers from the DL380, including the array, and everything appeared fine.

Naturally, I’d rather have the system running on the DL380s RAID controller (as the SCSI card and most of the hardware from the 800 was giving me fits, hence the migration), so I cloned the drive from the 800 (after it’d been running in the system for a while) to a RAID1 array. Upon boot, I get the Inaccessible Boot Device BSOD (after it shows the WIndows 2000 server splash screen).

I’ve verified the data copied over properly, as I booted an ERD Commander disk and saw all the data fine. I just need to know how to get this thing to boot using the right drivers w/out reinstalling everything (as the old 800 is hosed, and this has an IIS install that I need to have intact because of some old archaic code — didn’t write it, just inherited it).

I’ve done this fine with three other Proliant migrations, had no issue at all, but for some reason this one is giving me fits.

I’ve ran a Windows 2000 Recovery Console repair, and ran “chkdsk /r” three times and still get the error. I’m sure it’s the device driver, just don’t know how to get Windows to use the right one.

Thoughts? Ideas? Email or call, as I’ve been at this for hours now and am going crazy.

Update about 30 minutes later: After beating around this a bit more, I thought about HAL issues. I copied the hal.dll file from another like configured system, and it appears to boot up (unlike before). I thought a repair process checked the hal.dll, but apparently not — or at least it just makes sure it’s not corrupt, but it doesn’t make sure it’s the proper one for your system. We’ll see how it goes if this is a permanent fix or not. If it is, I’m going home.

Update later: It was, and I’m going home.

So last night I was at the office migrating servers between hardware. Nothing really exciting about it. One of the servers I was migrating was an older Citrix Metaframe 1.8 server. That migration was going from basically like-hardware to like-hardware. The only difference between the two machines was the larger RAID array, more RAM, and slightly different processor in the new machine. They were otherwise the same model of server, but I didn’t envision major problems, should they arise.

The clone took forwever, but it got done, I booted up the server, made sure the thin terminals could connect fine, and called it a night around 11:00PM last night. This morning at the crack of dawn, got a phone call that nobody could get into Outlook, Word, or any of the other Office XP programs running on the server. The error? Product activation due to significant hardware changes. I thought to myself “OK, easy fix, will just reactivate it.” I come to the office, attempted to reactivate on the terminals, and the activation window went away — never gave me a confirmation that it was activated. When I checked the product activation on the server itself, it told me it was activated, but it was spitting out errors on the client terminals. Tried repairing Office, still gave me fits.

I was spending too much time dealing with this when I had other places to be (as I split my time between a couple offices), so I said “Screw it.” A 30 second search found an Office XP activation crack (Anti-MSOPA.exe — google it) that cracked the mso.dll file, and errors went away. We’re a fully legal user of Office XP, have plenty of licenses, but I just didn’t want to deal with the activation crap that was causing us wasted time and potentially lost money. It’s sad I had to download hacker software to do it. While I still plan on finding out what was wrong, I didn’t want to waste company productivity to do it.

My Blackberry contract is due up for renewal here soon, and I’m considering transferring my number elsewhere. I’ve found myself using my phone for data use quite a bit more often than I originally thought, and wanted to get a phone that I could tether to my laptop for use on the road in a pinch (for when my employer decides they need something while I’m vacation). I also would like a Windows Mobile-based phone as software availability for the Blackberry isn’t nearly as plentiful, and usually costs more money for stuff I can get for free elsewhere.

I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of phones from Verizon and Sprint (the HTC Titan tops that list), but wanted to hear everybody’s experience with Verizon and Sprint locally. While I’ve heard great things about Verizon’s support and their network, I do like Sprint’s openness with their phones. Like with Sprint, the same phone has newer software and unlocked hardware (hardware GPS works with Sprint via an official update, while it requires an unsupported hack to get it to work on Verizon’s or US Cellular’s Titan. I’d rather not hack my phone if don’t have to. But I’ve heard really lousy things about Sprint’s support (but I don’t think I’ve dealt with support often in all my years of having a phone, really — I’d rather figure it out myself.) but their network is decent.

Any thoughts from the gallery?

(And you might notice that after yesterday’s discussion, all the links now open in new windows.)