Great ! Great !
I think the day is no so far when Microsoft will
understand there own problem.
They will invent that $$Microsoft$$ turned into
ProblemSoft ExpireSoft...DeadSoft
It's really paifull that A person unable to
guide/modify or makeup a OS.
A Person should Always follow the ProblemSoft's
problematic instructions.
Thank You
Mir Mahbub Alamgir
--- Russell John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Windows screwup forces Ubuntu shift
By: Charlie Demerjian
You never quite wrap your head around how
anti-consumer Microsoft's
policies are until they bite you in the bum. Add in
the customer
antagonistic policies of its patsies, HP in this
case, and vendors
like Promise, and you have quite a recipe for pain.
Guess what I did
today?
It started out quite simply, a client needed to set
up a small branch
office, something I do almost every week. Four
workstation and a
repository for files, occasional backups, and a
shared printer is all
they would need, nothing special. Five HP 5100s, a
printer, a Promise
TX2300 with mirrored drives and a DVD-R was all I
needed. That was the
easy part.
Out came the anaemic 40GB drive from one HP, and in
when the Promise
controller and two WD 200GB SATA drives. The TX2300
was a snap to set
up, the hardest part was rebooting 10 times until I
caught that CTRL-F
is the key to get into the card BIOS. A minute
later, the RAID was
built and it was time to restore the OS from the
CDs. Two thumbs up to
Promise here, it really could not be easier.
This is where the pain began. Microsoft has a policy
where the vendors
can't ship you a Windows CD so instead they have to
send you a series
of restore CDs. These option-free exercises in
rookie programming
mistakes are a shining example of what is wrong with
the industry. HP,
like the weak willed jellyfishes that they are, went
along with this
plan rather than stand up for the people paying
them.
The problem? The #*($ers at HP made it so the brain
dead restore
scripts would not see any hardware other than the
parts they shipped,
and it would not recognise the Promise controller.
Fair enough, it
isn't HP's duty to recognise everything, that would
be well beyond
anything I expected. You just press F6 and install
the drivers
manually, it gives you the standard Windows prompt
there.
Looking past the problem of the machine not having a
floppy, you can
easily add one for the initial install, things got
ugly quick. The
problem? Those weasels at Captain Junior Spy Central
disabled the F6
driver install on their restore CD! There is no
Windows CD so you can
do it manually, you either use theirs or have your
own copy.
If you have a copy of XP to use, guess what? The key
that comes with
the HP box is restricted to the version of Windows
on the restore CD.
Vanilla XP will not work, nor will any of the copies
I have lying
around. Your choice, use only HP hardware or buy a
copy of XP. A big
FU to MS and HP for this little ray of sunshine.
Money grubbing and brain dead tactics aside, I
figured I could boot
from the Promise CD and possibly manually format the
drives and dump
the install CDs to the HD. That trick will often
work to get you by
initial unrecognised drives. That is when I learned
half of the
problems with Promise, the CD it provides is not
bootable and contains
nothing resembling a tool. Sparse would be a step up
from what it
offers.
Biting back my fervent desire to throw this mess out
of a window, get
a gun, and go to Redmond, I put in the original HD
and booted into it
to see if there were any interesting tools to help
my plight. I tried
to install the drivers and noticed the second
problem, the #($#65533;ing
Promise CD doesn't have drivers on it! No, I am not
kidding, they ship
the card with a CD, but that CD has no drivers on
it! Honestly.
If you click the install drivers option, it prompts
you to put a disk
in the (nonexistent) A: drive to make a driver disk.
There is no
option to unpack, no option to put it in any other
location, you are
just screwed. Manually browsing the CD comes up with
the same programs
the moronic installer offers you. A: drive or the
highway. In this day
and age, there is no excuse for not shipping a
driver with hardware,
Promise really screwed this up.
So, unable to transfer the install easily, unable to
legally use a
different CD of Windows with my legally purchased
key, and unable to
install the drivers with the one I had, I was left
with only one
option. The machine was put in place Saturday
running Ubuntu. The
owner of the chain was informed of it, why it was
done, and what the
ramifications, mainly stability and security, were.
Luckily, he is a smart man, and from this point on,
Linux will be the
OS of choice on all his servers, it is cheaper to
buy, cheaper to
install, and much more secure. Desktops are under
evaluation, but
Microsoft lost this chain for sure
