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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this
morning when I went to plug it in, I received the message..."reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press key". There is NO operating system disc included with the boxes, only 2 discs, one a black device driver disc and one, a grey device driver disc included with the monitor. I was on the phone with tech support for at least 2 hrs this morning. No solution was reached. A tech support is, I hope, scheduled to contact us in the next couple of days, armed with new hard drives, to restore the system. However, because one of the discs allowed me to get into dos mode, I was able to dir the c drive. It's showing only 36mb with alot of dos type programs like format, etc. The tech support explained to me the RAID system being used to address the 2 750 gig hard drives. At one point, we went to the bios setup and under the advanced tab, system configuration, , changed from AHCI, to RAID. This still didn't solve the problem. I can't help thinking that, perhaps the bios needs upgrading as the tech support kept asking me whether the "RAID" option I tried was RAID 0 or RAID 1. Im happy to have the tech support come in, but I am equally prepared to flash bios the thing if it requires upgrade to recognize raid type systems. Suggestions would be appreciated. Scott. |
#2
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
On 12/26/2011 3:32 PM, sw wrote:
We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this morning when I went to plug it in, I received the message..."reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press key". There is NO operating system disc included with the boxes, only 2 discs, one a black device driver disc and one, a grey device driver disc included with the monitor. I was on the phone with tech support for at least 2 hrs this morning. No solution was reached. A tech support is, I hope, scheduled to contact us in the next couple of days, armed with new hard drives, to restore the system. However, because one of the discs allowed me to get into dos mode, I was able to dir the c drive. It's showing only 36mb with alot of dos type programs like format, etc. The tech support explained to me the RAID system being used to address the 2 750 gig hard drives. At one point, we went to the bios setup and under the advanced tab, system configuration, , changed from AHCI, to RAID. This still didn't solve the problem. I can't help thinking that, perhaps the bios needs upgrading as the tech support kept asking me whether the "RAID" option I tried was RAID 0 or RAID 1. Im happy to have the tech support come in, but I am equally prepared to flash bios the thing if it requires upgrade to recognize raid type systems. Suggestions would be appreciated. Scott. Dell BIOS flashes are found here; http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/...d=27311219 03 The latest is 06, but it did not address any RAID issues. Version 05 did not either. Both were only recommended besides. Your choice of RAID is important since RAID0 makes one 1.5TB disk of the 2 750GB ones, while RAID1 provides redundancy by mirroring the data onto both disks. It's unlikely that the BIOS is the problem. Dell's norm is to supply machines with the two drives as separate unless you requested something else or did something. |
#3
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
sw wrote:
We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this morning when I went to plug it in, I received the message..."reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press key". There is NO operating system disc included with the boxes, only 2 discs, one a black device driver disc and one, a grey device driver disc included with the monitor. I was on the phone with tech support for at least 2 hrs this morning. No solution was reached. A tech support is, I hope, scheduled to contact us in the next couple of days, armed with new hard drives, to restore the system. However, because one of the discs allowed me to get into dos mode, I was able to dir the c drive. It's showing only 36mb with alot of dos type programs like format, etc. The tech support explained to me the RAID system being used to address the 2 750 gig hard drives. At one point, we went to the bios setup and under the advanced tab, system configuration, , changed from AHCI, to RAID. This still didn't solve the problem. I can't help thinking that, perhaps the bios needs upgrading as the tech support kept asking me whether the "RAID" option I tried was RAID 0 or RAID 1. Im happy to have the tech support come in, but I am equally prepared to flash bios the thing if it requires upgrade to recognize raid type systems. Suggestions would be appreciated. Scott. Simple. Go back to DOS mode. The "C:" you were looking at, is the EFI partition. (I have no idea what it's for, but it was mentioned a couple days ago, as being in the 40MB size range.) The other partitions are likely NTFS, and you can't view NTFS from DOS. More modern versions of DOS, like FreeDOS, would make FAT32 visible for you. If you want to poke around your system, try a Ubuntu 10.10 LiveCD. Boot that, and that can observe NTFS or FAT32 partitions. With the fdisk command (executed in a Terminal window): sudo fdisk /dev/sda p # (for "print") q # (for "quit") will give you a review of the partition table. I think, with a well equipped "CD collection", you'd have that baby running in no time :-) ******* There is actually an "NTFS4DOS" program, but it doesn't have support for Long File Names (LFN). I tried to add LFN support separately, and that didn't work for me. Which makes the package rather useless, as the file names will all be converted to 8.3 shorthand, and virtually unreadable. So in name only, there actual is a way to look at NTFS from DOS. It just happens to suck... ******* The Ubuntu LiveCD is a much better bet, as it'll work. The Ubuntu 10.10 release, is the last one to be "completely free of the Unity interface". If you got the very latest version instead, you'd *hate* the interface. You want to get to the Terminal program as easily as possible, and Unity doesn't make that easy to figure out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_...ick_Meerkat.29 While the Ubuntu.com site might not make it easy to find 10.10, the mirror sites will have it. It won't be too long, relatively speaking, before support for the repositories for this will be stopped by Canonical. But you can continue to use the commands built into the CD. http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso...sktop-i386.iso Going back a level, you can see the other downloads available. http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs-Ubuntu/10.10/ I just checked the MD5SUM of my copy, and it's the same as the MD5SUM shown on that site. MD5 is a kind of checksum, and a (less than perfect) way of determining the download hasn't been tampered with. I have a Windows copy of "md5sum.exe" for checking ISO9660 files I download. MD5sum is also available in Linux, as "md5sum". 59d15a16ce90c8ee97fa7c211b7673a8 *ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso ******* What you need, is another PC to prepare that CD for you. A copy of Nero or Imgburn, can be used to convert an ISO9660 download, into a bootable CD. When you stick the CD into the new PC, the boot order will probably already have the CD first in the boot order. When the screen eventually comes up, *don't* click the install button. You just want to use it for poking around. The "Places" menu, may already shown some partitions on the hard drive(s) in your computer. From the Applications menu, eventually you'll find a copy of the Terminal program (like a DOS prompt, only with Linux commands). First, you'd do "ls /dev" and look for things like this /dev/sda /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda3 That would be a disk with three partitions on it. If you saw right after that /dev/sdb /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb2 that would be your second disk drive, with two partitions on it. If you do sudo fdisk /dev/sdb that will access the primary partition table of the second disk. If you enter "p" as the command, that will print the table. You can tell from the partition type, what kind of partition it is. The "fdisk" command has a table of partition values, or you can consult here as a double check. 0x07 is NTFS, 0x0C is FAT32. This scheme is hardly precise, as you can see from the history. In fact, some identifier types overlap enough, to cause damage when booting alternate OSes. http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partition...n_types-1.html If the partitions have "labels", the "Places" menu in Ubuntu may give the partitions easy names to refer to. For example, my Acer laptop calls the C: partition "Acer" of all things :-) The second partition on the laptop is called "SYSTEM RESERVED" and is part of what makes Windows 7 boot. It would be the active partition, and would have the boot flag set. (Shown as an asterisk in Linux "fdisk" output.) Anyway, if you want to play around, that's how you can do it. One other note - if you do indeed have a Windows 7 C: partition, *please* don't change files in there. You can look but don't touch. I've had a few problems fooling around with the laptop, and had to use the boot repair feature to fix it. I also had to restore from backup in one case. I don't have a solid recipe yet, of the "do's and don'ts" for that partition. I'd suggest mounting the partition read-only (which Linux supports), but Ubuntu doesn't make that easy for someone new to Linux. They don't even populate the /etc/fstab file properly any more, so you can't even get a prototype of what command options would be useful. My favorite tool for poking around broken PCs, is the Knoppix 5.3.1 DVD, but that would be a much longer download. The Ubuntu one is bad enough, at 700MB. You can get reasonably useful Linux CDs down to 200MB in size, and also use those for repair work. At 200MB though, some things are going to be missing, and you can't always get the info you need to get on with the job (like manual pages missing). ******* GParted, is another way to view disks. It is available as a command either from the Ubuntu application menu, or you can launch it from a Terminal window like this sudo gparted & The "sudo" gives admin privileges, the "&" means "fork the command and free up the command prompt so I can enter another command". You don't use the "&" thing on the fdisk command above, because that was an interactive session and you don't want it "floating in space". Interactive commands should "block" the terminal while you're using them, and that ensures they have the focus and get the characters you're typing as their input. GParted gives you a graphical view of the partitions. It looks much like Disk Management in Windows, one line of blocks per disk. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...64/GParted.png ******* I realize that introducing Linux to someone who has never used it before, is a tall order. But the point of me writing this much, is to point out there are *lots* of options for forensic work. Virtually anything else you grab, other than your DOS thing, would likely give access to NTFS, and tell you what's going on. If you had an actual Win7 DVD, you can boot that and use the "boot repair" option, which can fix simple damage cases to the setup. But since you've got a Dell, and haven't had a chance to burn any of the "backup discs" they make you burn, you don't have any recovery or repair discs yet. Which is why there are always other forensic options. Paul |
#4
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
On 12/26/2011 02:32 PM, sw wrote:
We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this morning when I went to plug it in, I received the message..."reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press key". There is NO operating system disc included with the boxes, only 2 discs, one a black device driver disc and one, a grey device driver disc included with the monitor. I was on the phone with tech support for at least 2 hrs this morning. No solution was reached. A tech support is, I hope, scheduled to contact us in the next couple of days, armed with new hard drives, to restore the system. However, because one of the discs allowed me to get into dos mode, I was able to dir the c drive. It's showing only 36mb with alot of dos type programs like format, etc. The tech support explained to me the RAID system being used to address the 2 750 gig hard drives. At one point, we went to the bios setup and under the advanced tab, system configuration, , changed from AHCI, to RAID. This still didn't solve the problem. I can't help thinking that, perhaps the bios needs upgrading as the tech support kept asking me whether the "RAID" option I tried was RAID 0 or RAID 1. Im happy to have the tech support come in, but I am equally prepared to flash bios the thing if it requires upgrade to recognize raid type systems. Suggestions would be appreciated. Scott. NO do not flash the bios It's important to know how the machine was originally configured you will need to talk to someone at tech support who can find that info and you will need to talk to someone there who knows what the hell they are doing as you will otherwise compound the problem If you cannot get satisfaction INSIST on talking to a supervisor... |
#5
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
On Dec 26, 4:37*pm, Paul wrote:
sw wrote: We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this morning when I went to plug it in, I received the message..."reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press key". There is NO operating system disc included with the boxes, only 2 discs, one a black device driver disc and one, a grey device driver disc included with the monitor. I was on the *phone with tech support for at least 2 hrs this morning.. No solution was reached. A tech support is, I hope, scheduled to contact us in the next couple of days, armed with new hard drives, to restore the system. However, because one of the discs allowed me to get into dos mode, I was able to dir the c drive. It's showing only 36mb with alot of dos type programs like format, etc. The tech support explained to me the RAID system being used to address the 2 * 750 gig hard drives. At one point, we went to the bios setup and under the advanced tab, system configuration, , changed from AHCI, to RAID. This still didn't solve the problem. I can't help thinking that, perhaps the bios needs upgrading as the tech support kept asking me whether the "RAID" option I tried was RAID 0 or RAID 1. Im happy to have the tech support come *in, but I am equally prepared to flash bios the thing if it requires upgrade to recognize raid type systems. Suggestions would be appreciated. Scott. Simple. Go back to DOS mode. The "C:" you were looking at, is the EFI partition. (I have no idea what it's for, but it was mentioned a couple days ago, as being in the 40MB size range.) The other partitions are likely NTFS, and you can't view NTFS from DOS. More modern versions of DOS, like FreeDOS, would make FAT32 visible for you. If you want to poke around your system, try a Ubuntu 10.10 LiveCD. Boot that, and that can observe NTFS or FAT32 partitions. With the fdisk command (executed in a Terminal window): * * sudo fdisk /dev/sda * * p * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *# (for "print") * * q * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *# (for "quit") will give you a review of the partition table. I think, with a well equipped "CD collection", you'd have that baby running in no time :-) ******* There is actually an "NTFS4DOS" program, but it doesn't have support for Long File Names (LFN). I tried to add LFN support separately, and that didn't work for me. Which makes the package rather useless, as the file names will all be converted to 8.3 shorthand, and virtually unreadable. So in name only, there actual is a way to look at NTFS from DOS. It just happens to suck... ******* The Ubuntu LiveCD is a much better bet, as it'll work. The Ubuntu 10.10 release, is the last one to be "completely free of the Unity interface". If you got the very latest version instead, you'd *hate* the interface. You want to get to the Terminal program as easily as possible, and Unity doesn't make that easy to figure out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_...rkat#Ubuntu_10.... While the Ubuntu.com site might not make it easy to find 10.10, the mirror sites will have it. It won't be too long, relatively speaking, before support for the repositories for this will be stopped by Canonical. But you can continue to use the commands built into the CD. http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso...buntu-10.10-de... Going back a level, you can see the other downloads available. http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs-Ubuntu/10.10/ I just checked the MD5SUM of my copy, and it's the same as the MD5SUM shown on that site. MD5 is a kind of checksum, and a (less than perfect) way of determining the download hasn't been tampered with. I have a Windows copy of "md5sum.exe" for checking ISO9660 files I download. MD5sum is also available in Linux, as "md5sum". 59d15a16ce90c8ee97fa7c211b7673a8 *ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso ******* What you need, is another PC to prepare that CD for you. A copy of Nero or Imgburn, can be used to convert an ISO9660 download, into a bootable CD. When you stick the CD into the new PC, the boot order will probably already have the CD first in the boot order. When the screen eventually comes up, *don't* click the install button. You just want to use it for poking around. The "Places" menu, may already shown some partitions on the hard drive(s) in your computer. *From the Applications menu, eventually you'll find a copy of the Terminal program (like a DOS prompt, only with Linux commands). First, you'd do "ls /dev" and look for things like this * * /dev/sda * * /dev/sda1 * * /dev/sda2 * * /dev/sda3 That would be a disk with three partitions on it. If you saw right after that * * /dev/sdb * * /dev/sdb1 * * /dev/sdb2 that would be your second disk drive, with two partitions on it. If you do * * sudo fdisk /dev/sdb that will access the primary partition table of the second disk. If you enter "p" as the command, that will print the table. You can tell from the partition type, what kind of partition it is. The "fdisk" command has a table of partition values, or you can consult here as a double check. 0x07 is NTFS, 0x0C is FAT32. This scheme is hardly precise, as you can see from the history. In fact, some identifier types overlap enough, to cause damage when booting alternate OSes. http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partition...n_types-1.html If the partitions have "labels", the "Places" menu in Ubuntu may give the partitions easy names to refer to. For example, my Acer laptop calls the C: partition "Acer" of all things :-) The second partition on the laptop is called "SYSTEM RESERVED" and is part of what makes Windows 7 boot. It would be the active partition, and would have the boot flag set. (Shown as an asterisk in Linux "fdisk" output.) Anyway, if you want to play around, that's how you can do it. One other note - if you do indeed have a Windows 7 C: partition, *please* don't change files in there. You can look but don't touch. I've had a few problems fooling around with the laptop, and had to use the boot repair feature to fix it. I also had to restore from backup in one case. I don't have a solid recipe yet, of the "do's and don'ts" for that partition. I'd suggest mounting the partition read-only (which Linux supports), but Ubuntu doesn't make that easy for someone new to Linux. They don't even populate the /etc/fstab file properly any more, so you can't even get a prototype of what command options would be useful. My favorite tool for poking around broken PCs, is the Knoppix 5.3.1 DVD, but that would be a much longer download. The Ubuntu one is bad enough, at 700MB. You can get reasonably useful Linux CDs down to 200MB in size, and also use those for repair work. At 200MB though, some things are going to be missing, and you can't always get the info you need to get on with the job (like manual pages missing). ******* GParted, is another way to view disks. It is available as a command either from the Ubuntu application menu, or you can launch it from a Terminal window like this * * sudo gparted & The "sudo" gives admin privileges, the "&" means "fork the command and free up the command prompt so I can enter another command". You don't use the "&" thing on the fdisk command above, because that was an interactive session and you don't want it "floating in space". Interactive commands should "block" the terminal while you're using them, and that ensures they have the focus and get the characters you're typing as their input. GParted gives you a graphical view of the partitions. It looks much like Disk Management in Windows, one line of blocks per disk. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...64/GParted.png ******* I realize that introducing Linux to someone who has never used it before, is a tall order. But the point of me writing this much, is to point out there are *lots* of options for forensic work. Virtually anything else you grab, other than your DOS thing, would likely give access to NTFS, and tell you what's going on. If you had an actual Win7 DVD, you can boot that and use the "boot repair" option, which can fix simple damage cases to the setup. But since you've got a Dell, and haven't had a chance to burn any of the "backup discs" they make you burn, you don't have any recovery or repair discs yet. Which is why there are always other forensic options. * * Paul- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - Thanks Paul. Are the forensic tools you've mentioned above, also able to act as repair tools? |
#6
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
On Dec 26, 4:45*pm, philo wrote:
On 12/26/2011 02:32 PM, sw wrote: We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this morning when I went to plug it in, I received the message..."reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press key". There is NO operating system disc included with the boxes, only 2 discs, one a black device driver disc and one, a grey device driver disc included with the monitor. I was on the *phone with tech support for at least 2 hrs this morning.. No solution was reached. A tech support is, I hope, scheduled to contact us in the next couple of days, armed with new hard drives, to restore the system. However, because one of the discs allowed me to get into dos mode, I was able to dir the c drive. It's showing only 36mb with alot of dos type programs like format, etc. The tech support explained to me the RAID system being used to address the 2 * 750 gig hard drives. At one point, we went to the bios setup and under the advanced tab, system configuration, , changed from AHCI, to RAID. This still didn't solve the problem. I can't help thinking that, perhaps the bios needs upgrading as the tech support kept asking me whether the "RAID" option I tried was RAID 0 or RAID 1. Im happy to have the tech support come * in, but I am equally prepared to flash bios the thing if it requires upgrade to recognize raid type systems. Suggestions would be appreciated. Scott. NO do not flash the bios It's important to know how the machine was originally configured you will need to talk to someone at tech support who can find that info and you will need to talk to someone there who knows what the hell they are doing as you will otherwise compound the problem If you cannot get satisfaction INSIST on talking to a supervisor...- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - As note mentioned, I am getting a visit in the next couple of days with 2 new hard drives. Got your message on the bios. Any boot sector utilites that you know of out there? |
#7
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
On Dec 26, 4:06*pm, Pen wrote:
On 12/26/2011 3:32 PM, sw wrote: We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this morning when I went to plug it in, I received the message..."reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press key". There is NO operating system disc included with the boxes, only 2 discs, one a black device driver disc and one, a grey device driver disc included with the monitor. I was on the *phone with tech support for at least 2 hrs this morning.. No solution was reached. A tech support is, I hope, scheduled to contact us in the next couple of days, armed with new hard drives, to restore the system. However, because one of the discs allowed me to get into dos mode, I was able to dir the c drive. It's showing only 36mb with alot of dos type programs like format, etc. The tech support explained to me the RAID system being used to address the 2 * 750 gig hard drives. At one point, we went to the bios setup and under the advanced tab, system configuration, , changed from AHCI, to RAID. This still didn't solve the problem. I can't help thinking that, perhaps the bios needs upgrading as the tech support kept asking me whether the "RAID" option I tried was RAID 0 or RAID 1. Im happy to have the tech support come *in, but I am equally prepared to flash bios the thing if it requires upgrade to recognize raid type systems. Suggestions would be appreciated. Scott. Dell BIOS flashes are found here;http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/...ils/DriverFile... The latest is 06, but it did not address any RAID issues. Version 05 did not either. Both were only recommended besides. Your choice of RAID is important since RAID0 makes one 1.5TB disk of the 2 750GB ones, while RAID1 provides redundancy by mirroring the data onto both disks. It's unlikely that the BIOS is the problem. Dell's norm is to supply machines with the two drives as separate unless you requested something else or did something.- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - OK. Based on your notes im going to avoid the flash bios option. Bit of a pain anyways. Thanks Pen. I asked the other gentlemen below but will ask if you know of a boot repair utility for Windows 7 that could work with raid? |
#8
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
On 12/26/2011 05:16 PM, sw wrote:
On Dec 26, 4:45 pm, wrote: On 12/26/2011 02:32 PM, sw wrote: We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this morning w However, becaus do not flash the bios It's important to know how the machine was originally configured you will need to talk to someone at tech support who can find that info and you will need to talk to someone there who knows what the hell they are doing as you will otherwise compound the problem If you cannot get satisfaction INSIST on talking to a supervisor...- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - As note mentioned, I am getting a visit in the next couple of days with 2 new hard drives. Got your message on the bios. Any boot sector utilites that you know of out there? As I said, if you fool with it, chances are you will just make it worse. If the machine was setup with a RAID array, you will need to re-create the original configuration...and if you don't know that , anything you do will only get you further away from the solution... that is why I never advise a "home user" to use RAID |
#9
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
On 12/26/2011 6:18 PM, sw wrote:
On Dec 26, 4:06 pm, Pen wrote: On 12/26/2011 3:32 PM, sw wrote: We ordered an xps 8300. It was received a couple of weeks ago and this morning when I went to plug it in, I received the message..."reboot and select proper boot device, or insert boot media in selected boot device and press key". There is NO operating system disc included with the boxes, only 2 discs, one a black device driver disc and one, a grey device driver disc included with the monitor. I was on the phone with tech support for at least 2 hrs this morning. No solution was reached. A tech support is, I hope, scheduled to contact us in the next couple of days, armed with new hard drives, to restore the system. However, because one of the discs allowed me to get into dos mode, I was able to dir the c drive. It's showing only 36mb with alot of dos type programs like format, etc. The tech support explained to me the RAID system being used to address the 2 750 gig hard drives. At one point, we went to the bios setup and under the advanced tab, system configuration, , changed from AHCI, to RAID. This still didn't solve the problem. I can't help thinking that, perhaps the bios needs upgrading as the tech support kept asking me whether the "RAID" option I tried was RAID 0 or RAID 1. Im happy to have the tech support come in, but I am equally prepared to flash bios the thing if it requires upgrade to recognize raid type systems. Suggestions would be appreciated. Scott. Dell BIOS flashes are found here;http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/...ils/DriverFile... The latest is 06, but it did not address any RAID issues. Version 05 did not either. Both were only recommended besides. Your choice of RAID is important since RAID0 makes one 1.5TB disk of the 2 750GB ones, while RAID1 provides redundancy by mirroring the data onto both disks. It's unlikely that the BIOS is the problem. Dell's norm is to supply machines with the two drives as separate unless you requested something else or did something.- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - OK. Based on your notes im going to avoid the flash bios option. Bit of a pain anyways. Thanks Pen. I asked the other gentlemen below but will ask if you know of a boot repair utility for Windows 7 that could work with raid? No I don't. I agree with others who recommend not using RAID at all. Also I think you should try the Dell group at alt.sys.pc-clone.dell for this issue. However, you need to make clear what you did as regards to RAID. |
#10
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Dell XPS 8300 christmas morning crash
sw wrote:
Thanks Paul. Are the forensic tools you've mentioned above, also able to act as repair tools? In my previous post, I was suggesting Linux as a means to check what hardware config is present. Windows 7 comes with a 200MB repair CD. When you buy a pre-built computer (like my Acer laptop), the OS will offer to burn that CD for you. But to get to that point, the computer must be bootable the first time. If the computer won't run at all, then you won't be able to run off one of those discs. And the manufacturer is too stupid to include one in the box. It's not an installer CD, so you can't "steal" anything of value from Microsoft. And as a consequence, I don't see why it can't be included with the machine. That CD doesn't do a hell of a lot. It will attempt to repair the boot files, if given a chance. It may attempt to run CHKDSK (it did that on my laptop once, and that took a while). But the CD isn't clever enough to fix everything. One web site, Neosmart, was offering a Bittorrent "pointer" to where it could be downloaded. But Microsoft sent them a cease and desist, and they took the link off their web site. (There is an archived copy of the web page, but at this point, it really isn't going to get you anywhere fast. If you didn't like my Linux suggestion, you're going to hate the setup necessary to finish a torrent.) ******* This page has documentation for the XPS 8300. http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...0/en/index.htm The Service Manual is HTML based. You download this ZIP and unzip it. Clicking on index.html should start the manual in your web browser. http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...n/sm/sm_en.zip The page covering the BIOS, mentions the setting options of disks. sys_setu.htm On a normal motherboard, you'd get two things. You'd have SATA Mode — AHCI; RAID (AHCI by default) and you could set that to RAID (if you had RAID disks). But the second thing you'd get, is a "RAID console". Once you save the BIOS settings, after changing to RAID, on the next startup, upon entering the BIOS, there is a chance to press something like "control-I". What should happen then, is a RAID console should open in the BIOS screen. If the two disks are detectable, and the disks have RAID metadata on them, then the fact there is an array present, should be shown in the console. That's all you'd really want to know there right now, is that an array has already been defined. If no array was mentioned in the status screwn, then somebody screwed up the setup somehow. So if you set the computer to AHCI, and it won't boot, then it might not be "individual disks" and it might be RAID. If you set it to RAID, and it still won't boot, then no RAID array of any sort is being detected either. The RAID firmware in the BIOS, looks for metadata on each disk. That's like a "stamp" on the disk, that says "I'm the even disk of a RAID 0 speed pair" or "I'm the odd disk of a RAID 0 speed pair". Since each disk has a unique stamp, you can move them from one SATA port connector to another, and the RAID firmware can still determine which disk is odd and which is even. So again, if this was my computer, I'd want to be able to access the RAID console in the BIOS, and verify the disks have been prepared for RAID and "stamped" according to their role. If the RAID console says "I can see two individual disks and no array defined", then you know it wasn't set up as RAID. So even without any kind of CD to use, there are still questions you can ask of your machine. But to get there, you need to find the magic key press sequence (assuming one is available) for a RAID console. And there is no evidence of a RAID console in the Dell manual. The thing is, there isn't much consistency in the key combo used, so while I used "control-I" as an example, it could be just about anything. (Some retail motherboards use ctrl-I.) This article has a few pictures. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...e_way?page=0,1 If the Dell had an EFI BIOS, you might see a screen like this. You can tell it's EFI, because the mouse works in the BIOS. Now, I notice in this page in particular, there is no array info shown. And I don't see any button for causing it to display that info. Which is a bit strange. http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u1392...isetup-big.jpg This is a more typical traditional BIOS RAID Console. The term "Option ROM" at the top, means the code that drew this picture, is a code module within the BIOS code. The BIOS code is a whole series of files, stored in a flash memory chip on the motherboard. Intel writes the RAID Console code, and a manufacturer buying an Intel chipset, gets to include that code module if the chipset supports RAID. In this example, the disks on Port 0 and Port 1, form a RAID 0 (speed) array, of total size 447.1GB. The odd stripes of data are on one disk, the even stripes of data on the other disk. http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u1392...-intelbios.jpg And that's kinda what I would expect, if your Dell has a RAID 0 (stripe for speed) kind of setup. ******* Now, if you had a Linux LiveCD to boot and test, it's just possible LVM (logical volume manager) would see and grok the odd and even disk in the RAID 0 pair, and automatically set things up so you could browse the partition. That's what I was hoping to do from Linux, is prove it was RAID by being able to see files in there. But the BIOS RAID console is another opportunity to do it, and do it without any more downloads :-) Paul |
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