We spent most of the week this week working on a Sony Vaio laptop. Normally when we tell a customer we'll upgrade a machine from XP or Vista to Windows 7 we tell them it takes anywhere from 3-4 actual hours to do it. No we don't sit and watch it for 3-4 hours but anyone who has upgraded a Windows XP box to Vista can tell you it takes a very long time.
This week we were treated to a new challenge that managed to push close to our time wasted records. A Sony Vaio laptop came in early this week and after trying the usual routes of upgrade (yea just stick a disc in the thing right?) we had to begin falling back on alternative measures, some of which we know work, others were pure experimentation.
Just accept that Windows 7 wouldn't boot. Nuff said. We then tried our least favorite method - Upgrade to Vista then Windows 7. The process is long and painful to say the least, but it usually works. This time it hung up at around 20% every time. We even blanked the hard drive and tried going from a clean Windows XP load. No luck.
Next up - Network boot from PXE. TOTAL FAILURE. The laptop wouldn't do it.
We even went so far as to plug the drive into another machine and run various disk partition solutions to dump a Windows 7 folder on the drive and boot into Windows PE directly. Nope no luck there.
Final attempts all involved ghosting the machine from various Windows 7 installations around the office just to get something on the drive we could work with. Again we were met with failure.
Why am I telling you this? Shouldn't I only keep to successes on our company blog? Occasionally we get stumped, thats life. We use heroic measures but as Adam Savage said on Myth Busters - failure IS an option. I can honestly say we tried everything to make this happen for the customer. I can't say whether it was due to a failed piece of hardware or just an incompatibility with the BIOS on this specific model. Perhaps some of both.....
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Windows 2008 Server R2 issues and fixes
As most IT people know almost two years ago Microsoft released their latest version of the Windows Server platform - Windows 2008 Server R2. R2 is a 64bit only version of the OS, in fact its Microsoft's first release of a 64bit only platform. It's built on the Windows NT 6.1 core, the same core as Windows 7. Now its almost two years later and you'd figure most manufacturers would have driver software ready to rock and roll and it'd be just a matter of dropping in the OS install DVD and boom - you're good to go right? Right? Yea sure whatever. I'm sure this is the situations in some cases but here are two examples of things gone wrong.
My first example of a problem with Windows 2008 Server R2 involves an HP Proliant DL370 G6 Server and their HP SmartStart install CD. Just to bring you up to speed - the SmartStart disc is a CD that comes with all HP Servers that facilitates installing numerous OS's. You drop the disc in the CD rom, boot the system and follow through the prompts, it installs their HP software along with the OS and honestly its fabulous. Well it is unless you need to install R2. I've had to roll out several of these servers and we use HP's Proliant line pretty exclusively when we use a pre built server solution, HP provides great service and a great product. They don't seem to be aware of the fact that R2 exists however. I don't know how or why that is but every time we go to install R2 on an HP server we have to generate a memory stick, disable the onboard IDE controller and install our OS from the OEM Windows DVD instead of trying to use the SmartStart Disc.
Step 1 - Download a program like the HP USB Utility from http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/core-management-100.html or use WinToFlash http://download.cnet.com/WinToFlash/3000-2094_4-10974471.html
Step 2 - Follow the directions from WinToFlash or use the HP USB utility to create a Windows 2008 Server R2 installation key on your USB flash drive (hint you'll need 4-8gb of storage for this so make sure you get a big enough USB stick)
Step 3 - Go into the BIOS on your server and disable the onboard hard disc controller (ide not the SATA)
Step 4 - Boot up off the USB key and install as normal. You may have to get drivers for your SATA RAID card but thats the next story......
The second scenario I just ran into. Recently we built up a server for a customer who had a need for a high end database server. We opted to utilize the brand new Adaptec 6805 Controller along with their AFM-600 Zero Maintenance Module. I felt this was a good choice as its a lightning fast controller with a nice new feature - SSD cache instead of a battery for the cache protection scheme. We put the thing together and behold...... it doesn't work with R2. Yes Adaptec claims it does but it must take a smarter guy than me to make it work. We did everything we could including cheat to get this thing going on R2. According to Adaptec's own documentation - you must load the driver TWICE (yes they use caps in their doc). However I can attest to trying to load it a dozen or more times using the version off their CD and the latest and greatest from Adaptec's own site. It simply does not work. I wound up installing Windows 2008 Server and it worked 100% flawless. The controller is fast and everythings as expected.
I'm sure that in most scenarios R2 is great and easy to install. Perhaps I've just stumbled across two isolated incidents using random hardware. Either way I can't imagine why two giants like HP and Adaptec don't have 100% quality support for the latest and greatest version of Microsoft's flagship server OS.
My first example of a problem with Windows 2008 Server R2 involves an HP Proliant DL370 G6 Server and their HP SmartStart install CD. Just to bring you up to speed - the SmartStart disc is a CD that comes with all HP Servers that facilitates installing numerous OS's. You drop the disc in the CD rom, boot the system and follow through the prompts, it installs their HP software along with the OS and honestly its fabulous. Well it is unless you need to install R2. I've had to roll out several of these servers and we use HP's Proliant line pretty exclusively when we use a pre built server solution, HP provides great service and a great product. They don't seem to be aware of the fact that R2 exists however. I don't know how or why that is but every time we go to install R2 on an HP server we have to generate a memory stick, disable the onboard IDE controller and install our OS from the OEM Windows DVD instead of trying to use the SmartStart Disc.
Step 1 - Download a program like the HP USB Utility from http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/core-management-100.html or use WinToFlash http://download.cnet.com/WinToFlash/3000-2094_4-10974471.html
Step 2 - Follow the directions from WinToFlash or use the HP USB utility to create a Windows 2008 Server R2 installation key on your USB flash drive (hint you'll need 4-8gb of storage for this so make sure you get a big enough USB stick)
Step 3 - Go into the BIOS on your server and disable the onboard hard disc controller (ide not the SATA)
Step 4 - Boot up off the USB key and install as normal. You may have to get drivers for your SATA RAID card but thats the next story......
The second scenario I just ran into. Recently we built up a server for a customer who had a need for a high end database server. We opted to utilize the brand new Adaptec 6805 Controller along with their AFM-600 Zero Maintenance Module. I felt this was a good choice as its a lightning fast controller with a nice new feature - SSD cache instead of a battery for the cache protection scheme. We put the thing together and behold...... it doesn't work with R2. Yes Adaptec claims it does but it must take a smarter guy than me to make it work. We did everything we could including cheat to get this thing going on R2. According to Adaptec's own documentation - you must load the driver TWICE (yes they use caps in their doc). However I can attest to trying to load it a dozen or more times using the version off their CD and the latest and greatest from Adaptec's own site. It simply does not work. I wound up installing Windows 2008 Server and it worked 100% flawless. The controller is fast and everythings as expected.
I'm sure that in most scenarios R2 is great and easy to install. Perhaps I've just stumbled across two isolated incidents using random hardware. Either way I can't imagine why two giants like HP and Adaptec don't have 100% quality support for the latest and greatest version of Microsoft's flagship server OS.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Welcome!
Welcome to PC Innovations blog! We're new to blogging here so please bear with us while we get our feet underneath us.
If you don't know us we've been in business in Edmond, Oklahoma for 15 years providing technical support, computer sales and repair. We travel all over the state of Oklahoma and even into Texas, Kansas and Arkansas. Of course we're well versed in most of Microsoft's offering and we're an Apple Authorized Service Provider or AASP for short. We also have extensive experience working in multiple distributions of Linux, specializing in RPM based distributions.
So what will we be posting on our blog? Everything under the sun and then some I imagine. Expect to see information on products we happen across that we find to be interesting or maddening. We'll probably have some software reviews and perhaps even some information on cell products.
If you don't know us we've been in business in Edmond, Oklahoma for 15 years providing technical support, computer sales and repair. We travel all over the state of Oklahoma and even into Texas, Kansas and Arkansas. Of course we're well versed in most of Microsoft's offering and we're an Apple Authorized Service Provider or AASP for short. We also have extensive experience working in multiple distributions of Linux, specializing in RPM based distributions.
So what will we be posting on our blog? Everything under the sun and then some I imagine. Expect to see information on products we happen across that we find to be interesting or maddening. We'll probably have some software reviews and perhaps even some information on cell products.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)