Doktor Gummi Posted June 14, 2008 Share Posted June 14, 2008 I posted here before about my Dell Precision 470, which basically wasn't gonna play. I tried with a couple of versions and eventually did the smart thing - I suspected that the machine itself was faulty and put it ever so gently back in the spares pile... Now I'm trying with an HP xw4300: on the surface, possibly not as suitable since it's single P4 not dual Xeon, but on the other hand it's 667 DDR RAM, ICH7 SATA RAID and whenever I've used these in the past they have been superby stable... And so it has proved, with Leo4All sliding straight on without even a scratch of the head. Some stuff doesn't fly - notably the onboard broadcom, the audio and the onboard Firewire, but I'll just work gently through the forum and see what's available. My suspicions about the Precision 470 being flakey have been propped up by putting the Nvidia card that had failed miserably under Leo4All on the 470, into the HP: no problemo. I'm typing in glorious 1600 by 1200 on my HP 20 incher, without a video pathc in sight! The run of luck continued: went to a computer fair today and happened to spot a PlusCom Gbit ethernet card on a stall for £20. It's the NGPRTL8169SC - 32-bit PCI gbit ethernet. Stuck it in the HP (taking out the Intel Pro1000T, which didn't seem to want to get a DHCP address correctly) and bam, instant networking. If it turns out I need this to do a job of work then I think I'll just kill off the onboard Broadcom and run with this. In use, the system feels about as fast as my Mac Pro, with only the occasional short pause as the CPU gets hit with lots of threads. I'm gonna have a go at making a better disk config, courtesy of SuperDuper, and see whether the sound can be coaxed into life too... Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/110574-hp-xw4300-sweet-as-a-nut-almost/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doktor Gummi Posted June 15, 2008 Author Share Posted June 15, 2008 Ooookay... looks like SuperDuper is not so super. I tried using Disk Utility to set up an MBR target partition on a bigger better drive, and then set Super Duper copying to it: doesn't work. Somehow the MBR write of the drive doesn't mark it sufficiently active for the PC to actually use it for startup. In the end after a lot of jumping about (can't boot from a floppy because floppy-based OSes won't see a drive on the ICH7 controller; can't boot vanilla XP and HP pretty efficiently hide the F6 additional driver for Xp setup... I ended up doing the start of an XP install and as soon as the first reboot was over with, hit it with Leo4All. is there no OSX solution to "blessing" the MBR of a disk to make it suitable for SuperDuper? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/110574-hp-xw4300-sweet-as-a-nut-almost/#findComment-784699 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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