Vlad
Moderator
In the server room at work, all alone in the corner was a Compaq Prosignia 200 and a Comapq Proliant Disk Array. The Proliant 800 server the disk array had belonged to sadly had a bad psu and was a Socket 8 based machine. 
Anyway I took the RAID card out of the Proliant 800 and put it into the Prosignia 200 (Slot 1 PII) and hooked up everything on the bench. First I vacumed what seemed like 5 cubic feet of dust out of the RAID array only to find its cabnet locked. Since the keys were long gone, I used a paperclip and a tiny screw driver to pick its lock. (Really easy for a reason) and managed to get it open. It had 5 9.1 Ultra Fast SCSI disks in a mirror array. After cleaning up both machines, I fired up the disk array expecting the worst. It just sat there humming away happily. OK, so far so good. I fired up the Prosignia server and installed Windows Server 2000. Time for the big test. Could the server still play nicely with the Disk array? Yup, after sitting for god knows how many years in that room getting kicked and messed with, the server was fine. The Disk array however started flashing its "ATTENTION!!!!" Light at me. Ut-oh. I got the Utility from Compaq's website and looked at the Disk array's internal setup. The array had been misconfigured by its previous owners. After playing with it for a while I managed to get all 5 disks in RAID-5.
So the moral of my rambling? It may look desolate and dead, but if you give it enough attention and love, even long forgotten Servers and Disk arrays can still serve a use. (This thing will end up a file server.) I'm really suprised that the Disk Array still worked. None of the disks had any problems what so ever. It's really loud though. The Prosignia server just needed an OS, and the Disk array needed something to connect to it. For being rejected by another company and sitting in our server room for so long, I'm still shocked it did anything at all, let alone operates with no problems. The whole thing was kinda fun.....
Anyway I took the RAID card out of the Proliant 800 and put it into the Prosignia 200 (Slot 1 PII) and hooked up everything on the bench. First I vacumed what seemed like 5 cubic feet of dust out of the RAID array only to find its cabnet locked. Since the keys were long gone, I used a paperclip and a tiny screw driver to pick its lock. (Really easy for a reason) and managed to get it open. It had 5 9.1 Ultra Fast SCSI disks in a mirror array. After cleaning up both machines, I fired up the disk array expecting the worst. It just sat there humming away happily. OK, so far so good. I fired up the Prosignia server and installed Windows Server 2000. Time for the big test. Could the server still play nicely with the Disk array? Yup, after sitting for god knows how many years in that room getting kicked and messed with, the server was fine. The Disk array however started flashing its "ATTENTION!!!!" Light at me. Ut-oh. I got the Utility from Compaq's website and looked at the Disk array's internal setup. The array had been misconfigured by its previous owners. After playing with it for a while I managed to get all 5 disks in RAID-5.
So the moral of my rambling? It may look desolate and dead, but if you give it enough attention and love, even long forgotten Servers and Disk arrays can still serve a use. (This thing will end up a file server.) I'm really suprised that the Disk Array still worked. None of the disks had any problems what so ever. It's really loud though. The Prosignia server just needed an OS, and the Disk array needed something to connect to it. For being rejected by another company and sitting in our server room for so long, I'm still shocked it did anything at all, let alone operates with no problems. The whole thing was kinda fun.....