Adventures With HP Microserver
From
Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to
All on Wed May 29 14:16:15 2024
I have a graphics card coming tomorrow that will give me HDMI and DVI so I
can retire the VGA monitor.
I thought I would have an experiment today and try to get it to boot from
an SSD in the DVD connector.
I started by putting an internal SATA controller in, fiddly but went in,
then connected the old boot drive to it. Disconnected all the drives
except the one in the card then re-booted and it booted fine.
Turned off, re-connected the other drives, re-booted OK but no sign of the other drives. Swapped the PCIe slot the card was in (suggested by Google)
and again it booted but only saw the boot drive.
Dithered around a bit then went searching for the unofficial BIOS that is supposed to enable AHCI on all drives. Found it, created a FreeDOS thumb
drive, copied it over, re-booted (all other drives disconnected) and it
flashed the BIOS. Re-connected the boot drive and re-booted OK but drive
speed was grim. Shut down, re-connected other drives, re-booted, no sign
of them.Even worse the network had packed up (it didn't work when the PC arrived but an official BIOS upgrade fixed that)
Went thorough the process of making another thumb drive with the official
BIOS, installed it, played with drive configurations and ended up booting
from an SSD fitted where the DVD goes and connected to the DVD SATA
connector which it was happy with and recognises all the drives.
The boot drive benchmarks at 189/180 MB/s on AS SSD Benchmark while the
other run at 257/239 MB/s. It's going to run my backups so I think the convenience of having the OS drive tucked away and the backup drives
readily accessible will work for me.
I was a bit wary connecting/disconnecting cable to remove the mobo tray
but it seems to have survived, have to do it again tomorrow to fit the GFX card.
One thing that surprised me is the number of cables you can leave
disconnected yet it still boots and runs!
--
Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
We chose to do this not because it is easy but because we thought it would
be easy.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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