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Dell Optiplex GX270 (Athens)
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Athens is a desktop development machine with 1GB of memory
and a 120GB SATA hard disk, and a Sound Blaster Live! (Dell)
sound card.
An install using the beta4 Debian Installer, booting from CD-ROM, was
performed (19 May 2004). Attempt to install a 2.6 kernel (linux26)
failed to find the SATA drives. So the standard 2.4 kernel was used.
This does support SATA but it identified the drive as an IDE, hence it
became /dev/hda. On upgrading to kernel 2.6.6, which the identifies it
as a SCSI, fails to boot since it can't find the /dev/hda. This
required, after installing kernel-image-2.6.6-1-686-smp,
telling grub that for this kernel the root file system is now
root=/dev/sda by editting /boot/grub/menu.lst. Also,
edit /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sda as /.
Alternatively, the Dell oriented Debian Installer can be used (from
https://wiki.osuosl.org/display/LNX/Debian+on+Dell+Servers)
to install a 2.4 kernel which identifies the SATA as SCSI. This was
then the installation that remained with Athens.
A further problem was that the BIOS (A03) did not report the right
amount of VideoRam (even after setting it to 8MB in the BIOS setup).
Consequently X11 could not get a decent resolution. A service call to
Dell resulted in a gx270sea.exe BIOS update which fixed the problem.
An alternative fix was the 865patch Debian package which provides a
software fix to the problem without having to fiddle with the BIOS.
An official BIOS A04 was released and installed, and video memory fix
was apparent as was DRI now working. It is also worth noting that Dell
have released a project called biosdisk:
$ wget https://linux.dell.com/biosdisk/biosdisk-0.4.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf biosdisk-0.4.tar.gz
$ cd biosdisk-0.4
$ sudo sh install.sh
$ cd ../
Place a floppy disk in the drive
$ sudo biosdisk GX270A04.EXE
Then reboot your system from the floppy
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You can also add a Grub menu item to boot from hard disk, loading the
BIOS update!
On upgrading to Kernel 2.6.6 the DVD/CD was not being recognised. The
old ide-scsi is now deprecated for cd burning. Needed to
add ide-generic and ide-cd to
/etc/modules, which can also be done manually with
modprobe:
# modprobe ide-generic
# modprobe ide-cd
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The DVD/CD is then identified as /dev/hdc. To allow general
CDROM access the group of this device was changed to cdrom
(from disk):
The CD can then be mounted, perhaps by an appropriate link:
# ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom
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Use cdrecord to check for the SCSI view of the device:
$ cdrecord -dev=ATA -scanbus
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Tools like gnomebaker
should also find the appropriate device.
Using the common cdrecord the device is specified as in:
$ cdrecord dev=ATA:1,0,0 -data file.iso
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After 18 months of usage the hard drive started failing.
From /var/log/syslog the following messages were regularly
being reported, and whilst these were being reported the computer froze:
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
...: sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
...: Additional sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
...: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 193611904
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Luckily, my original order included 3 years gold service. After making
contact with Dell they immediately couriered me a replacement hard
drive, a Western Digital WD1600JS. No SATA cable though so had to buy
one while I had both drives in the machine. The old drive was
duplicated on the new drive as described in
Section 26.5.
In January 2006 the mouse died. Could still move it about but button
clicks seemed to send extra stuff? Replacing with an older USB mouse
and all was okay after a reboot, but replace with hte broken mouse and
it failed. Once again, Dell were very quick to courier a replacement
mouse.
Subsections
Copyright © 1995-2006 [email protected]
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