[geeks] latest system monitoring for Solaris 10 x86

[Lionel Peterson]

On Mar 20, 2009, at 3:32 PM, Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>  
wrote:

> 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.

The Dell T105 uses an unusual/unpopular nvidia chipset, IIRC, Ubuntu  
had a problem with it as recently as 8.04

>> 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 rescue disks are all outdated (thus my drivers are too), and you use  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.

Vista/Server 2008 allows you to load drivers through the GUI where you  
select system disk, you click advanced, IIRC.

Lionel