Dell 1950 {part deux}
Ok,
So I finally got the stupid machine up and running, but I made a huge assumption that I shouldn’t have, I have built linux servers, but this is only the fourth or so time that I have built a windows server and with the openmanage (Dells server utility disk) to boot. So the drama is that when I was going through the setup (and yes this is stupid) when it asked me if the boot partition should be 12 GB, I was like yeah that sounds about right. I didn’t realize that the *boot* partition is the c:\ drive and that made it only 12GB in size.
Now this box is for my boss to have a little sandbox to play around in, with a certain application (which there is some side story here, but i’ll get to that later). Ok, so I didn’t realize till he was installing said application that there was only 12GB on the harddisk(s - 2 250 RAID 1), and knew something was wrong. So back to the drama, the boot disk for the 1950 (openmanage 5.3) only likes to work some of the time, 80% of the time it asks me to insert the OM 5.3 disk (that is already in the drive bay), so one of my coworkers (and mentor by the way) overheard a conversation and was curious why I thought that if I booted the cd multiple times I’d get different results (definition of insanity is doing the same task/thing over and over again expecting a different result) so that led to some laughs (though I think most of my coworkers think I have a nut or two loose anyways). I digress I am getting sidetracked (which isn’t unusual) one of the times I had booted the cd I got the prompt for the windows 2003 server disk (and that’s how I got the damn machine installed).
Here’s the side story for the application, I am installing exchange for my boss to play around with, and we have the uber m$ support so we have all the disks, except the 32bit version of exchange. Unfortunately there isn’t a common sense error message as it spits out “The disk in drive D:\ is valid, it’s just not built for the processor you are running on” (not a direct quote but close enough). Now as I did one would assume that (there I go with assuming again - really got to break that habit) it would have a label somewhere on the disk, but NO - fat freakin chance. We finally figured it out by downloading and installing the 32bit version and trying to install the 64bit version, and realized that if we had paid closer attention to the freakin disk name (something like EXBLAZD64) we would have seen from the end number that it was 64bit. Anyways I have another chance to get the mofo up and running tomorrow, and hopefully all of the software will play nice.
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