NAS 1000s - New drives / Upgarde to WSS 2003 / Which USB-DVD drive ?

[Boris.N.NY · Accepted solution]

Finally I have done similar capacity upgrade with pretty much same course of events as in the last post. I am now running a 1000S upgraded to 4x500 GB NAS-optimized Maxtors with 5-y drives' warranty. Long in the works but finally happened.

The above notice about a upgrade/regrade necessary covers a BIOS upgrade on a v.2 hardware needed to install WSS 2003 off a recovery DVD. Not an upgrade part number - I've done it with a QuickRestore DVD. I have WSS licenses from elsewhere, but somehow I wasn't prompted. When all was finished HP Updater utility still listed my hardware as 1000S yet I was running WSS 2003 on it.

In my case AMI BIOS went up from 3A03 to 3B01. Then DVD continued with the same "boot device failure" hickup. I have also noticed that to kick off the DVD boot before BIOS upgrade I had to cold boot the NAS - it kept attempting a hard drive boot only on any soft reboot. I don't remember if I had to repeat the same trick with the upgraded BIOS. But it did put in all BIOS defaults and again attempted to boot from blank new drives untill I again changed it to CD boot only.

Out of curiosity I repeated the same restore on new 2TB drive space using original Win 2000 for 1000S restore DVD - worked just as well. I didn't go all the way on it with patches et al. and re-did WSS 2003 pretty much with identical post-BIOS-upgrade scenario happening.

I noticed that memory usage on WSS is much less that on 2000 using that (even after updates) PSM (Persistent Storage Manager) driver set - system memory use barely ever approaching the factory-installed 512MB RAM limit. With PSM on 2000 I have regularly had slow downs because on paging going to disk.

[Azam Shad]

Hi Boris.

Another excellent reply. Thanks. It appears as though the quick restore DVD *will* install WSS 2003 on a Nas 1000s. I will post further details later but cannot report a succesful install yet.

The Nas 1000s was running Server 2000 ans was part of a domain. After the install of WSS 2003 completed, I am left with a log on screen showing User:Administrator and a blank password box.

I've tried leaving it blank, entering passwords including Administrator, and the previous password for the Nas unit when it was part of the domain but it won't let me log on.

Help please !

[Azam Shad]

Downloaded the HP Nas 1200s Admin guide where it says the default user name is Administrator and password hpinvent. I'll give it a try in a little while and post back here.

[Azam Shad]

Right. Used password and got into the Nas 1000s now running WSS 2003. Moving around the O/S and everything seemed okay.

This means its *IS* possible to get a Nas 1200 quick restore DVD free of charge from HP and use it on a Nas 1000s (version b). The disk will first upgrade the BIOS and then install a completely new O/S destroying any information that was held on the previous install.

Obviously HP need to take a look at this as it affects licensing etc. I am quite happy to pay for the price of an upgrade disk even though I haven't got one, but I am going back to the previous install of Windows 2000 for a number of reasons.

1. Reading back on the forums, it seems as though installing windows 2003 service pack 1 results in the Nas crashing. It is only fixed by a small zip file available from hp support. I doubt they would be prepared to give support on an unlicensed install of WSS 2003.

2. I still have another Nas 1000s running windows 2000. Copying large video files between this and the WSS 2003 led to virtually a system hang on the WSS 2003. When the file copy was cancelled, the WSS 2003 began resynching the drives which took several hours. It maybe down to the Maxtor hard drives installed, but I didn't have this problem when it was running Windows 2000.

3. My primary reason for trying to install WSS 2003 was so that I could find some way of getting the two drives to appear as one large shared file to my media player device ( http://www.tvix.co.kr/ENG/Products/HDM5000U.aspx ) which can only access a single shred folder. I (mistakenly) thought that this was only possible under WSS 2003, but the distributed file system is also available within windows server 2000.

So, it was an interesting trip for me, but ultimately back to the basic configuration the came with the Nas 1000s.

Thanks for all the assistance.