On Tuesday 01 Jul 2008, jtd wrote:
On Tuesday 01 Jul 2008 14:50, Arun Khan wrote:
On Tuesday 01 Jul 2008, jtd wrote:
I have yet to come across a machine on which you cant install a linux distro.
Way back, a colleague had picked up a Compaq rack mount server (dot com bust auction) with a WinNT server installation. We were unable to install; we tried RH, Mandrake, Caldera. The install would hang.
For such machines, use a boot server and image file.
I did not know about this technique back in 2000. Even today, though I am aware of it, I have not tried it yet.
Or dd a minimal install to the disk. connect the disk to another machine to do this.
In the specific machine, all the disks were part of hardware raid - we did not want to mess with it's setup.
In the distant past, in many cases where installations were bombing, running memory check showed up bad ram.
Hmm. how do you do this if the system fails to boot some sort of live cd (with mem test tools)?
If an install bombs i simply change the ram nowadays and send the ram back to the vendor.
Yup, if it is still under warranty. In our case it was not, buying new memory would cost my colleague more than what he paid for the server (way back in late 2000).
Had we persisted, we would have found some hack but at that time it was not worth the time and trouble. Strange but true, it did not hang when we tried NT install.
-- Arun Khan