Trying to refurbish a server

[Relztrah]

I work for a charitable outreach that receives, among other things, donated computers. I perform a lobotomy on them, reinstall Windows and a couple other items, and give them away to a family who would otherwise not have access to a computer.

I was given a Compaq Prosignia 200 which is apparently a server since it has 3 hard drives and different cables and configuration. I have no interest in using this machine as a server, and I simply want to do the same fdisk and reformat that I normally do.

Well, if you’ve followed this thread this far you know that whatever type of hard drive (SCSI?) that a server uses is not going to let me do the standard PC operations. Is there any way to download a BIOS or do some kind of mumbo-jumbo that will allow me to turn this baby into a standard PC? And can I perform some operation on the other two hard drives so that I can use them in old machines?

Relztrah

[Variable]

Problem is going to be: are you going to be able to find another computer that will use these particular SCSI drives. Sounds like this is a rare thing, getting a donated server. So using just one SCSI and keeping the other two for future use is probably not a good idea. Another thing, SCSI drives are usually a lot smaller than IDE drives especially if this is a 5+ year old machine.

Hardware RAID is pretty easy to set-up, just follow the instructions when the machine boots. Hit the f -key to enter SCSI configuration, then delete the existing volumes. Now you have a choice, when you see the size of the drives you can tell whether it would be wise to span the drives (making all three basically one big drive) or using them as 3 separate volumes. Like C: D: E:
Setting up fault tolerance is probably not useful since these will be low- income familes and will probably not be able to go out and buy a new SCSI disk if one fails...

**I can't seem to connect to Compaq Prosignia 200 support site, but I know that some Compaqs use a special boot disk to get things started. You may be able to bypass this if the drive still have the old drivers on them.**

Once you define what kind of array you have, it will scrub the disks. This is like a chkdisk. Once this is done. Your all set. Scrubbing can take some time., depending ont he drive size.


Once you have set up the RAID array in BIOS the rest of the pc set up is just like every other computer.