E 30's

[Jethro_1]

Does anyone recommend E 30's and know how much they cost (just case, power supply, motherboard, and card board)

[Martin Breidenbach]

NetServer E30 ? They are *OLD*.

My E45 here is a PII-266. E30 is probably P133 or something similar.

[Jethro_1]

P200 auctually i believe

[Martin Breidenbach]

Which OS do you want to run on them ?

[Martin Breidenbach]

I found a PDF file with E30 specs:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/lpn11179/lpn11179.pdf

Quote:

"Enjoy true server power with Pentium 133MHz or 166MHz processor"

:-)

[Jethro_1]

You were right then 133 i dont run them im currentley setting up a couple of E40's and have about 4 E30's kicking about need fitting and OS installing but since im a complete newbie i'm having trouble getting a OS on I can get past Operating System Not Found with a windows XP boot disk and get a A: drive command line and install a SCSI card driver but i'm still having no luck. The HDD light on one is on and the other is not I think the HDD might be a bit dodgy because all this stuff is free of a mate who stopped it from being skipped! I just need something to play with OS's other than WIndows on.

[Martin Breidenbach]

I've got several old 'test' boxes here. There are two old HP Vectra VL5 boxes (P166 192 MB RAM) here which were salvaged from garbage and built from parts taken from several machines. And there's a NetServer E45 (PII-266 192 MB RAM).

The problem is that they don't run 'modern' operating systems well or even not at all.

On the Vectras SuSE Linux 8.2 works but KDE is sloooow. I'm using one as 'infrastructure' server providing DNS, WINS, DHCP and NTP services.
Netware 6 doesn't work because it requires a Pentium II.

On the E45 Netware 6 install hangs with an error message. Novell Knowledgebase indicates BIOS compatibility problems. Win2K runs but doesn't detect the floppy drive ! The official answer to this problem is that the E45 ROM BIOS is not Win2K compatible and there's no update. There's no official HP support for Win2K on the E45. I won't try XP or Win2003 server on it because it won't be fun on a PII-266 anyway. SuSE 7.x works but SuSE 8.x installation aborts.

So: old hardware will run old operating systems. New operating systems may not run properly or may not run at all.