This has been one of "those weeks." Please bear with this story - it may not be good, or interesting, or enlightening, but it sure helps me vent :)

We have some performance testing planned this week. In order to get to the tests (syncing notebooks to a SharePoint server), we need a pair of servers set up to use for testing. One of the other testers here and I both had some nice pieces of hardware we use for our HyperV machines which we tagged as needing to pull double duty this week. We decided to donate them to "the greater good" but also wanted to make sure we did not lose any data on our drives while the machines were repurposed.

We decided to pull our hard drives from the machines and scare up a couple of extras to use for the testing. That way, our data would sit comfortably outside the computers while they were being used for testing. Easy enough. These machines are Dells and they have little trays to hold the drives which make removing and installing them easy.

The tray just slips on and off. No screws - very nice.

Anyway, I was given two drives to install. One was SATA, the other EIDE. I was told that the machines we had supported both SATA and EIDE. I got one of the machines moved to the lab and had to cable it into the network:

I popped open the case and could not find an EIDE cable at all. Turns out these machines do NOT have that connection, so I plugged in the SATA drive. The machine would not boot - it gave me "file system not found errors." Sigh. After much troubleshooting, I figured the drive was bad.

Wait for more hardware. Get more hardware. Install the drives and the BIOS self tests now pass.

I moved them to the lab. The lab is wired for 220 volts, not 120, so flip the little switch on the back to avoid destroying the power supply. This is different from my laptop. My brick there supports 110 to 240, and 50 or 60 Hz power.

We have the capability at work to boot "to the network" and install an OS. I've done this a few times and it is very useful for new machines. The lab, though, is on a different configuration and machines in there cannot boot to the network. No big deal - I grabbed a Windows DVD and tried booting to it to install from the DVD drive. Naturally, the DVD I had was just a file copy of the setup files and was not bootable. Another sigh.

One of the folks on my team helped me out and burned a bootable ISO. At that point, things snapped into place pretty quickly. I got the machines finished installing Windows and we set them up as the servers needed for the testing.

Despite the hitches getting set up, testing is going well. We're getting some very good data to analyze. You cannot have too much perf!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John