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General discussion

Trying to refurbish a server

Aug 6, 2004 10:19PM PDT

I work for a charitable outreach that receives, among other things, donated computers. I perform a lobotomy on them, reinstall Windows and a couple other items, and give them away to a family who would otherwise not have access to a computer.

I was given a Compaq Prosignia 200 which is apparently a server since it has 3 hard drives and different cables and configuration. I have no interest in using this machine as a server, and I simply want to do the same fdisk and reformat that I normally do.

Well, if you?ve followed this thread this far you know that whatever type of hard drive (SCSI?) that a server uses is not going to let me do the standard PC operations. Is there any way to download a BIOS or do some kind of mumbo-jumbo that will allow me to turn this baby into a standard PC? And can I perform some operation on the other two hard drives so that I can use them in old machines?

Discussion is locked

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Re: Trying to refurbish a server
Aug 6, 2004 10:32PM PDT

"Well, if you?ve followed this thread this far you know that whatever type of hard drive (SCSI?) that a server uses is not going to let me do the standard PC operations"

I don't quite understand why formatting a drive and reinstalling a non-server OS will not be possible on this machine. Give more details on why this will not work.

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Re: Trying to refurbish a server
Aug 7, 2004 1:03AM PDT

When I boot this machine with my Win 98 startup disk I first get an error message about drive positions have been changed which makes sense because I removed two of the three hard drives. But I left the top HD (the master?) connected to the mobo. I press F1 to continue bootup from error message and eventually get to ?Windows 98 has detected that drive C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition...blah, blah, blah, no surprises here. Machine sees the startup floppy in A and gives me a normal A prompt. I type in fdisk and get ?No fixed disks present?.

Does this have something to do with the jumpers? These hard drives don?t have the standard jumper choices MA, SL, CS that I?m used to. Rather, they have 6 choices: LED, RES, BIT3, BIT2, BIT1, BIT0. Which one(s) do I jump?

And to further confuse me, there appears to be another set of jumpers on the front of the HD which have choices: TE, DS, ME, WP, PD, RES, TP, TP. None are currently jumped. I?m obviously dealing with a different animal here.

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My advice.
Aug 7, 2004 1:20AM PDT

Until you learn SCSI, put it back as you found it, then use FDISK and format to prepare the drive to install 98.

Let me be clear that since SCSI documentation is all over the internet, there is no need to put it in this small space.

Bob