Tag: windows 2008 server
Switching Windows 2008 Server from Intel to Intel
by BenV on Aug.20, 2013, under Software
At work they’ve been busy changing the building a bit. In fact, lots of bits. This resulted in me having to indicate how and where they had to move the server rack to, and having to point out obvious facts such as that the cabling has to be redone.
So last week they moved the rack, fucked up the cabling and wondered why outgoing phonecalls didn’t work anymore (“because you put the line jack in the wrong port”) and why the printer didn’t work (“Because it doesn’t work on a telephone line, try connecting the network port next time”) etc.
Another casualty of this was the windows 2008 server. Scheduled to be replaced by a virtual machine soon(TM) along with the rest of the obsolete hardware in the rack, it decided it wouldn’t boot anymore after being shutdown. Fortunately giving it a new power supply helped it move along for another couple of days.
Today however, after another shutdown, it didn’t want to boot anymore again. Being sick of the old failing hardware I decided to move it temporarily to a new workstation for the CAD division until the new server is ready. The old hardware was a lousy Pentium 4 (3Ghz orso) with 8GB RAM, the temporary workstation is a HP Z420 with a quad core Xeon E5-1620 and 16GB of ECC. Quite an upgrade…. if only windows would agree.
The problem with changing hardware in windows is simple: It’ll BSOD on boot. Who cares about your business, you changed the hardware, so you’d better make some time to either reinstall windows (from backup if you’re lucky) or kick it hard enough to work on the new hardware. Microsoft has some details on fixing it here.
For me it fortunately would still boot in safe mode, where I could issue from an administrator command prompt:
BCDEDIT /set detecthal YES
After this it would reboot without a BSOD and I could get busy installing 23984732984723 drivers, obviously starting with an ethernet driver. (in 2013… still having to install ethernet drivers for run of the mill broadcom cards… pffrt.)
Oh well, at least I didn’t need a reinstall. YET.
Did I mention it wants to be reactivated? 😉
