Win XP Install after Linux

Although I do not like doing it, sometimes I have to install Windows XP on machines which have Linux installed on them. Mostly when I have an option to give a newer machine to Linux, I do so and an older machine often gets Windows XP installed to be given out to a user.

For the past couple of times I have noticed that it is not so easy to install Win XP and to replace FC5. If going the normal way and booting from Win XP SP2 CD, it gets up to the point where it tells you \”Inspecting Hardware Configurations\” (which is right at the begging of install), then it shows just black screen and freezes there. I\’ve been fighting with this problem for long time trying to disable different devices from BIOS (I though I had problems with devices if install freezes right after hardware detection stage), but nothing helps. The solution to the problem was to remove all linux partitions from the drive and then everything works! I really hate this!

HP rack building experience

Yesterday I had a nice experience of building the HP rack. I used to build custom racks with different hardware inside before and I would say it is not a very easy task. This is not to said about HP racks, especially when all the hardware to be in the rack is from HP as well. Actually, I didn\’t need to use a screw driver a lot, only in certain places (like removing the cover from the server to convert it from tower to rack mountable). Everything is fixed with locks, but not screws, everything matches the place perfectly. I really enjoyed the experience.

The only problem was faced is that I didn\’t have a conversion kits for old ML350 servers (G2 and T01) so I had to drill the wholes in the part of the rails of the conversion kit for G4 to be able to attach them to the old machines. I am glad that HP guys haven\’t seen me when I was drilling the rails (they would cry). I had no other choice, sorry guys :)