[Sussex] OK - recommend me a distribution, please...

[Neil Ford]

On Tuesday, February 4, 2003, at 09:23  am, Mark Harrison wrote:

>
>> What kind of proliant are you looking to install on?
>
> 1850R
>
>> Some Compaq systems require a special partition to be written to the 
>> hard
>> drive for diagnostics. This is something to be aware of, as it won't 
>> let
>> you configure the hardware properly without it. I've seen RedHat 
>> delete
>> this partition, and the computer forget what drives it has, or what
>> processors its running. This is simply a quirk with the Compaq
>> architecture.
>
> I'm fairly sure that this one doesn't. I've currently got (gasp) SUSE 
> 7.0 on
> it, I just figured it was time to upgrade.
>
The 1850R's did require the SmartStart partition if you wanted to have 
access to all the BIOS features. If you are going to do a re-install, 
then I suggest getting hold of the latest SmartStart CDs, booting from 
those, installing all the utilities, etc. and then doing the OS install 
afterwards. Last time I did this, the CDs gave you the option of an 
assisted RedHat install but I always preferred doing it manually. Had 4 
1850Rs running quite happily originally as web and database servers and 
then as Half Life servers (once the company was closing down).

BTW - why are you upgrading? If the machine is running fine and doing 
what you want, why mess with it? Of course, make sure it's up to date 
security patch wise, but why a re-install?

Neil.