Box Swap

Posted by John-Erik | Filed under Uncategorized

A “box swap” like you’re doing will only work properly, ever, if the OS drive is on the same controller (or same as far as drivers are concerned). What you didn’t mention is what the rest of the error message was, which is an “INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE” error caused by the OS bootstrap loader loading (ntldr) since the BIOS can see it, and ntldr can use the BIOS to load your kernel (ntoskrnl), hal (hal.dll) and the drivers for your disk controllers, but then when the kernel tries to load the rest of the OS it discovered that it didn’t exist because it could not access the rest of the OS with your old drivers.

Actually, a swap like this can and will work fine on Windows 2000 and Windows XP and I’ve done it before, but that requires the OS being on an offboard disk controller that moved with the disks or the controllers be “close enough” (such as going from an i440FX PII233 to an i440BX PIII800).

Yeah, I know enough about them to know that you can’t squeeze almost anything out of an ES chip, especially a Xeon, even if they are the small cache variety (as the clock speed would indicate). Their main advantage over regular PIIIs is the boards you can use them in and some flash RAM that big companies can use. What boards am I talking about? How about dual channel RAMBUS with U2W SCSI and 64 bit PCI and 4X AGP Pro slots. Basically though, you can’t get the boards anymore because they’re so darn expensive. For the same price, you could get some dual Athlon MP action going.

On the flipside though, the boards for those chips is what made them so solid, so if you want a 24/7 server I might invest in a board for them.

Permalink | January 23rd, 2004

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply