Occasional thoughts and deeds of an Engineer
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  • It all started with ……

    Posted on July 11th, 2014 cwmoore No comments

    This week all started with a little project to make a couple of old Dell GX270’s run again.  I have three and just wanted to make one run so I could use it to connect to my downstairs HP Deskjet 5510 All-In-One printer.  I did not want to junkup my Win 7 Ultimate machine with a XP throwback driver by making the machine run in XP mode.  The Deskjet is connected to our “home” phone – which is a VOIP connection – so I can send faxes whenever is necessary.  So, I had the machine up and running pretty quick but then decided to clone an old IDE drive to use in machine #2.The #2 cloned drive went pretty smooth using WDD Acronis software.  However, the drive would not boot – I guessed the MBR was missing or corrupt – so I started down a path that has taken all week and an end is not in sight.  I am now on my third clone of the #2 drive using an iso of the Acronis backup utility.  This is happening as I write so we shall see.Needless to say, there have been hundreds of interruptions while this whole process was going on so I do not feel too bad that I cannot focus and just get the job done…Oh ya, did i forget to say that my eBay mistake arrived?  Yes, it is here and just sitting majestically and awaiting to confound me even moore :): It is a Dell Precision T5400 with x2 Xeon quad core processors, graphics card, 8Mb RAM plus dual 160MB HDD’s.  I think I will RAID them just for fun.  However, I need a legit copy of Win 7 Professional (or at least a COA number) to activate. WAITING NOW!—-Dell Precision T5400 Workstation-still waiting and bought a full version Win 7 Pro for the Dell Precision Server:  will it live up to expectations?  This is an experiment that may be a throwback to some older server version.  The Dell Precision has matched 160GB drives so I could Raid 1/0 which is what I will most likely do.  I am sort of tired of backing up to multiple machines at erratic intervals.  NOTE: While trying to restore a couple of GX270 boat anchors, I looked at a whole bunch of IDE drives I had and guess what – there is a whole bunch of unique data from 2005 – 2010 time frame that exists no where else.  OK, mpre data for the 2 TB drive I back up to.   I did run the System Test and it passed OK but had some anomolies I did not understand with the memory valid areas.  This is a later check out but at least the machine runs, seemly, OK.