[Fedora] Re: IBM Netfinity 5000

[Jack Lauman]

I had four of them. They came from IBM with the service partition 
installed. They also came with a set of SmartStart 8+ CD's for NetWare, 
NT4, SCO, AIX, etc. in the event you needed to restore them to their 
factory configuration following a disk failure.

If the factory software is missing from the service partition or is 
corrupted that's what your problem is.

Compaq rack mount DL-360's behave exactly the same way your describing 
when their service partition is corrupted or missing. When configured 
correctly Fedora 11 installs without incident.

Jack



On 12/25/2009 06:26, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
> Jack Lauman wrote:
>> You need to boot up with the IBM NetFinity "SmartStart" disk and
>> install a service partition for NT4. Compaq Presario DL-360 rackmount
>> servers don't have a BIOS than can save parameters, as I recall from
>> working on the NetFinity 5000 years ago at Gannett, they don't either.
>> The startup parameters are stored on the service partition of the boot
>> disk created with "SmartStart".
> The machine was already running NT4. So whatever service partition it
> needed would've already been there. On the other hand, I don't ever
> remember having to do that when we first purchased it. It came bare, and
> all we did was stick the NT4 disk in, boot, manually install the SCSI
> drivers from a floppy and the WinNT install took over from there.
>
> That's not to say that you're not correct. You could very well be, I
> just don't recall ever having to do that.
>