Yes, here come some cheapo, generic VisionMan 10 servers for Dillon Supply’s rack. $1600 for the pair with 1GB of RAM each and a Western Digital 250GB Hard Drive.
The BIOS could see the 250GB drive and it’s full capacity (of course Windoze 2K Server setup could not) but the RealTek PXE boot manager hated it. So I bypassed it and still kept getting the ‘ol “Hard Disk Fail: Drive Not Found” error when trying to boot straight to the drive.
In frustration I popped the 80GB drive in that came with the stupid thing back in. Formated it NTFS, loaded 2000 Server, SQL Server Enterprise, alot of of dependencies, hotfixes and anti-virus. Bang – server running. Now it’s time to add the 250GB drive which Windoze will see now that SP4 installed…. but noooooooo…
The freakin’ server’s only got enough power couplings coming off the 200W power supply for one hard drive! So why did they build the chasis for two??? And to make matters worse, the way the drives fit in the drive bay doesn’t allow for the IDE cable to reach both drives. I gotta find a cable with more distance between the female inputs. Splitting power and abnormal cable requirements – that’s what goin’ cheap gets you. Quite a pain for a couple of test servers.
When you ordered the servers did you inform Vision that you were going to install another drive? did you tell them what O/S you were planning to load? I have several of their servers and have found Vision to be very helpful. I let them know what OS I’m loading and they test it out first. You’d be surprised how much hassle you can avoid by just calling them on the phone. They will give you power splitters and anything else you want for free. Give them a call. -Jack
Let me guess… you bought this from TigerDirect. Go direct next time and buy it from the manufacturer – VisionMan. They ROCK! 800-690-6771. Later –
Do you guys work for VisionMan or something? Once I got the necessary cables everything went fine. These servers are now performing adequately as a test platform for Prophet21 Commerce Center Ver. 10.5.