[geeks] latest system monitoring for Solaris 10 x86

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Mar 20, 2009, at 11:26 , nate at portents.com wrote:

>> I made two CDs with this and also the related UBCDWINDOWS, neither of
>> which would boot on the T105.  I suspect the issue is the all-SATA
>> motherboard, or some other support issue.
>
> Could you be more vague than to say, "the all-SATA motherboard"?

Well, I've read a lot of forums, and it seems pretty widely understood  
that this means a board with all SATA and no ATA ports, or some  
circumstance that is effectively the same.

Besides, I'm not your consultant... I was just reporting some things I  
tried and the results I saw.

I didn't intend to start providing technical support, just sharing  
experience.

> That statement isn't really useful in any way, since there are  
> plenty of
> "all-SATA" motherboards that will boot UBCD and BartPE,

It's perfectly useful in stating, quite correctly, that the disks I  
made would not boot on my Dell T105.  It wasn't intended to say  
anything more than that nor did I imply it should.

If you read the thread though, you'd see that I said my install and  
rescue disks are all outdated (thus my drivers are too), and you use  
those to build the custom images.

> You could explain what drivers you did (or didn't) slipstream into the
> BartPE you built and how exactly it failed to boot if you wanted to  
> share
> something useful.

Yeah, if I had infinite time.

BartPE and UBCD4WINDOWS (which is a variation of the former) both come  
with a lot of drivers, and I used their latest releases.  I don't have  
time to enumerate all of that for you.

The downloads are free so if anyone needs that information they can  
get it.

There were no diagnostics to report on why the boot failed, so there  
is no information there.

I don't have time to search for drivers, extract them, and test OS  
images until they work, so I just ran Linux and called it a day.

>> It comes with a CD that installs several known operating systems, and
>> I believe it works by running Linux first and then inserting drivers
>> needed to get Windows to boot.
>
> Yeah, they do that to work around providing different Windows install
> discs with slipstreamed drivers or have customers use the F6 driver  
> load
> during install method.  So while Vista includes AHCI support (the SATA
> controller mode that supports things like hot-swap and NCQ) XP doesn't
> unless you slipstream in the appropriate drivers, i.e. if you PC  
> BIOS has
> your SATA controller in AHCI or RAID mode XP (2002 or 2003, 32-bit or
> 64-bit) will not be able even see your hard drives unless you use  
> the F6
> driver load method, or slipstream, or use Dell's method of using  
> Linux to
> preload the appropriate drivers for the Windows installer to use.

As far as I can tell, you can't use the F6 method on a lot of modern  
systems.  They won't even boot far enough to get to that unless they  
boot up emulating IDE with their SATA drives.  A lot of systems now  
have dropped emulation from what I see in their BIOS.

The Dell T105 just locks up immediately with all of my Windows XP boot  
disks, and there is no BIOS option to enable ATA emulation.

I wondered if you could use the utility disk for doing Windows XP  
installs to get the right drivers loaded, and then put in UBCD4WINDOWS  
or something like that, but didn't have time to explore that  
possibility.



-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com