weirdbeardmt
May 10th, 2009, 07:32 PM
Hi,
Have inherited three old Compaq Evo slimline machines that were surplus to requirements. They look good, few issues tho:
1) No CD drives (only multibay things)
I've got one of the machines up by just swapping in the hard drive from a different Ubuntu 9.10 machine, but I ran in to some issues when trying to install to the drive in the machine
- I attached a variety of USB CD drives and changed the bios to allow boot from USB media - but it just wouldn't do it. I know the install CDs I have (both 8.04 and 9.10) are fine because they worked on a standard install route - but on the external drive, it didn't.. any ideas?
I tried using Smart Boot Manager from a USB key - I copied it from the install CD but when I boot with it, I just get "SBMK bad!" - how do I fix that?
(FYI - I don't have any Windows computers - only OSX (and now this Ubuntu machine) - I coped the files using dd in a terminal window.
2) I've got three of these identical machines - I was thinking about doing some sort of totally pointless but fun "cluster" type thing... any thoughts on doing this with Ubuntu?
3) Can I create an image of the machine that is up and running and just copy that to the hard drives of the other machines (I have one of those IDE to USB adaptor things) - so that I don't actually have to install it 3 times?
Thanks!
Have inherited three old Compaq Evo slimline machines that were surplus to requirements. They look good, few issues tho:
1) No CD drives (only multibay things)
I've got one of the machines up by just swapping in the hard drive from a different Ubuntu 9.10 machine, but I ran in to some issues when trying to install to the drive in the machine
- I attached a variety of USB CD drives and changed the bios to allow boot from USB media - but it just wouldn't do it. I know the install CDs I have (both 8.04 and 9.10) are fine because they worked on a standard install route - but on the external drive, it didn't.. any ideas?
I tried using Smart Boot Manager from a USB key - I copied it from the install CD but when I boot with it, I just get "SBMK bad!" - how do I fix that?
(FYI - I don't have any Windows computers - only OSX (and now this Ubuntu machine) - I coped the files using dd in a terminal window.
2) I've got three of these identical machines - I was thinking about doing some sort of totally pointless but fun "cluster" type thing... any thoughts on doing this with Ubuntu?
3) Can I create an image of the machine that is up and running and just copy that to the hard drives of the other machines (I have one of those IDE to USB adaptor things) - so that I don't actually have to install it 3 times?
Thanks!