I have an ex-company desktop that I am setting up for my friend's 98 year old mother, whose existing one was used by Noah. She has a mind like a razor but her eyesight and her memory for PC related things isn't great and I want to make it as simple as possible.
It's a Dell Optiplex with XP Professional. I have removed the "domain" business by switching to "workgroup" and there is now one user account with administrator privileges and Guest Account is "off".
I have removed the password by changing it to an empty field, so she doesn't need one but the password dialogue still appears - it is only necessary to hit enter to continue.
Q1. How can I get rid of the password dialogue?
The second problem is that I can't get the DVD RW drive to see a disc. I might have disabled it in some way - initially I thought I needed to crack the administrator password so I made an bootable disc with Ophcrack LiveCD on it. The machine ignored this and boot from the HDD. I went into BIOS and the first boot option as I suspected was the HDD so I changed it to the DVD RW drive. It still booted from the HDD.
Device manager says it is working properly. The BIOS setup says is there there and enabled. My friend (whose work PC it was) says it worked before I got hold of it.
Q2. What might I have done to stop this drive working properly? I can understand why a system admin would try to prevent a networked PC from being booted from a disc, is it disabled in some other way? Not that it will see files on any disc now - the drive shows in MyComputer but no disc or files - it doesn't even flash the activity light, though it does when you insert a disc.
It seems unlikely it's actually bust?
Grateful for any help.
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wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_disable_Windows_XP_login_prompt
>It seems unlikely it's actually bust?
On a dell optiplex? used in an office? its seems very likely indeed its bust.
Personally I would consider dumping XP and putting on one of the linux variants for the olds
www.eldy.eu
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Thanks Z. Password prompt gone.
The Linux distro looks interesting. I'd be tempted to try that if she'd never used a PC. I might anyway, though my past experience of Linux conversions has been that there was always something you couldn't get to work properly, a printer, a drive, the wireless or whatever.
I'd still like to get the DVD drive working - I'm convinced I must have knackered it.
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if you cant get it to boot a cd - thats before the windows kernal gets control - then its a hardware or bios issue
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Good thinking. It doesn't even "try". No whirring etc.
Everything else seems to work and I can't see anything else in the setup, so the drive is prime suspect?
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connectors dislodged in the move?
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>> connectors dislodged in the move?
I'll check again tomorrow. I did wiggle them at the drive end earlier.
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Incidentally he's given me another one for my son whose PC has died. Rather than one of the Optiplex desktops, it's a tower that they were told was "more expandable". Not that they ever did.
I can hardly lift it. It weighs 26kg and the power supply looks as if it will run an electric fire. Still has a small HDD, 160GB, but reports 3.2GB of RAM (haven't checked what's actually in it) rather than the 1GB of the Optiplex, and a Xeon 5420 2.5Ghz rather than the Pentium Dual 2160 1.8Ghz. I haven't started on that yet.
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>> Incidentally he's given me another one for my son whose PC has died. Rather than
>> one of the Optiplex desktops, it's a tower that they were told was "more expandable".
>> Not that they ever did.
>>
>> I can hardly lift it. It weighs 26kg and the power supply looks as if
>> it will run an electric fire. Still has a small HDD, 160GB, but reports 3.2GB
>> of RAM (haven't checked what's actually in it) rather than the 1GB of the Optiplex,
>> and a Xeon 5420 2.5Ghz rather than the Pentium Dual 2160 1.8Ghz. I haven't started
>> on that yet.
sounds like that was a technical workstation, cad or spreadsheets
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Thanks Z.
Have now got the tower one working minus domains and ctrl-alt-del login prompts.
There are 2 identical 160GB drives that seem to be in raid config on the SAS controller. Not sure if that's good or not. Leave it? If we add a larger SATA drive in the usual way, will it just work?
He's having his floor reinforced. It's remarkably quiet considering the number and size of fans it seems to be equipped with.
I think the other one has a dead drive. It fails the self test and Dell's support answers suggest it's probably the laser, will find out when we swap it.
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Nice shiny new DVDRW drive is a mere 16 quid:-
tinyurl.com/bnzulcs
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Just wait until the electricity bill comes through after that Xeon's been left on for a month. Though on bright side son can turn radiator off in winter.
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>> Just wait until the electricity bill comes through after that Xeon's been left on for
>> a month. Though on bright side son can turn radiator off in winter.
That would explain the gigantic heatsinks and fans. And the fact that the PSU is three times the usual size. It's certainly a belting case - all the drives clip in and out, the case is superb compared with the cheapo things I'm more familiar with.
The desktop is fine now that I have swapped the drive for one from an identical machine, thanks Z. Because I'd been fiddling with the BIOS settings I was convinced I'd done it, but it must have been coincidence - apparently it was thought to be OK when it was taken out of service a few weeks ago. I nicked the memory out of the other machine too, so it now has 2GB instead of 1.
The rather elderly lady who will be using it has poor eyesight, so I've set the "Accessibility" options for large black characters out of white. The screens look like something from the 1970s now.
There's supposed to be a "magnifier" feature you can turn on, but I can't figure out out it works at the moment...tonight's job.
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>
>> There are 2 identical 160GB drives that seem to be in raid config on
>> the SAS controller. Not sure if that's good or not. Leave it? If we add
>> a larger SATA drive in the usual way, will it just work?
In short, maybe, possibly not, but you will probably not end up with the amount of drive you think. It all depends on how the raid is set up. Fiddle around in the BIOS and Windows disk manager to see how its configured.
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If this was built as a workstation for performance, there is a good change the RAID is striped for performance (as Zero is thinking, so RAID 0). If so then you cannot remove a drive and expect it to work because the data is interleaved across both.
If it is configured as a RAID mirror (RAID 1) then removing one drive will probably be possible by breaking the RAID mirror.
You mention the machine has SAS controller - Serially Attached SCSI. This is different to SATA, as I am sure you know. Not sure you could add a SATA drive if there is only a SAS controller. I think SAS is backwards compatible with SATA 2. You cannot attach a SAS drive to SATA controllers though.
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I wonder how much electricity this old workstation is going to use. I've managed to get my quad core i7 2600k with 16GB RAM, nVidia graphics (GTX 660), 2 x SSD's (Windows and Mac) and a separate 1TB SATA3 drive to use less than 70W*. I bet this workstation takes quite a bit more.
* Uses more when gaming or running all the CPU cores etc. But when using it for normal things it does not consume as much as I thought it might.
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Thanks both.
Boy has gone off with it so I can't look at the moment. I have another to play with but I'm waiting for a VGA/DVI adaptor to come in the post so I can attach a monitor.
The BIOS shows 3 SATA locations IIRC, one of which has the DVD RW on it, so it must have a SATA controller as well.
I'll report back, I'm sure you can keep me on the right path.
The elderly lady's new desktop is looking good now. I put MSE on it, but Trend Micro Officescan appears intermittently. I can't remove it as I haven't the admin password for it, but it doesn't seem to cause any problems. I found various bits of info on t'internet on how to change .ini files and edit the registry, but it won't allow me to do those things or stop some of the associated services, so I'll ignore it unless she reports a problem.
The lady in question is actually hors de combat at the moment, unfortunately having fallen at the weekend and broken her wrist. I gather she's fairly stoical about it, probably a quality conferred by living through two world wars!
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I have now got the monitor plug adaptor so I can play with the other Xeon workstation.
Problem number one is that Windows starts but doesn't find the keyboard or mouse. Booting into set up the keyboard works OK.
Keyboard & mouse work in safe mode, so hardware must be OK and it's a WIndows problem?
I don't have the Ctrl_Alt_Del p/w for this so I can't get much further.
I had a go with the password cracker (boots from a Linux CD) but it doesn't find any "partition containing hashes". I tried to figure it out but couldn't, but there was no sign of Linux seeing the two hard drives. These are 2 WD 160GB SATA drives which according to the BIOS setup are on the SAS controller. There was some reference to 'mounting the locations' (why don't they use English?) but I couldn't make any sense of it.
I wouldn't mind just installing Linux and ditching windows, I've never had a Linux PC. I'm downloading Mint 14 with MATE which seems to be the advised version for Neddies. Is that just going to install, or do I need to do something about the drive connections?
Well over my ears now :-)
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The Linux bootable distribution probably can't find the SATA drives attached to the SAS controller because no SAS drivers are being loaded.
The term 'mount' on Unix (and Linux) refers to mounting disk partitions. They are mounted on mount points (folders) with every folder (and therefore mount points) having ultimately a root folder of /. Unlike Windows, there's no concept of drive C, D etc. for drives on Unix. Although a drive/partition in Windows can be mounted under a folder location.
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>> I wouldn't mind just installing Linux and ditching windows, I've never had a Linux PC.
>> I'm downloading Mint 14 with MATE which seems to be the advised version for Neddies.
>> Is that just going to install, or do I need to do something about the
>> drive connections?
It probably will have the drivers to see the SAS controller as its a distro designed to be installed.
You are going to need to tell us the machine name and model number at some stage if this fails.
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OK thanks.
I have booted it with the distro DVD.
It is seeing the two 160GB drives (no drive letters) and I can view the folders and files therein. It sees the floppy drive but says it can't mount it, is that just because it's empty?
There are some CAB files on there - maybe the original factory set up is still on it? The cab folders are in DellSecurity - not sure how I could make use of the recover files even if they are still here?
The only off kilter thing so far is that the screen blinks about every 10 seconds. Maybe a driver thing? It's a bog standard 17" Dell monitor.
The PC is a Dell T7400 with a quad core Xeon 5420 processor, 4 GB RAM, model DCD0.
Should I hit install, or might I be able to recover it?
Last edited by: Manatee on Fri 26 Apr 13 at 17:39
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Funny thing this linux.
On a whim I stuck a usb wireless dongle in as it rebooted from the DVD before trying an install.
It just worked. It's a carppy generic thing that needs the driver disc to work with windows.
It has has Mint v14 installed in an 80GB partition on one of the disks.I still have the flicker issue but it is downloading the nvidia drivers (I hope).
Given I can now see the windows files, should I be able to sort that out I wonder?
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>
>> There are some CAB files on there - maybe the original factory set up is
>> still on it? The cab folders are in DellSecurity - not sure how I could
>> make use of the recover files even if they are still here?
I would guess that recovery using them is impossible unless you have a recovery partition or cd
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Personalising ex-company PC - Zero
