Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with ubuntu and hardware

How to get Win 7 to recognize a large HDD

lord_yo — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:49:25 -0800

How can I get Windows 7 64bit to recognize my 3 TB SATA hard drive? BIOS sees it, it works fine under Ubuntu, but it doesn't show up in Win 7's disk manager / storage tool. Approaches so far:
- Updated BIOS
- Formatted disk as GPT under Ubuntu
--- first with two 1.5 TB partitions
--- later without any partitions (just GPT format)
- Rescanned / refreshed under disk manager

Further info:
- The disk won't be used as boot disk (but as additional storage)
- Disk doesn't show up under Win 7 device manager
- BIOS shows disk, but with reduced size
- Ubuntu shows the disk as it should be.

Is there a third party driver I could use under Windows 7?
Am I missing something to get this HDD to work?

What's a good simple and cheap media or file server setup?

wastelands — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:15:38 -0800

Advice for a server newb who needs help getting started with a simple media/backup/torrent server? I've got a 438 GB movie collection an on external 500 GB USB hard drive right now, so I need to upgrade. I was thinking of buying two 1 TB external drives and using rsync for a poor man's RAID 1 setup. But for good drives plus shipping, that's nearly $250, and I thought, why not just setup a real file server? And maybe get a Bit Torrent thingy going too, so I could turn off my main computer at night and keep transfers going? Heck, I'd probably come up with other useful things for the server to do too.

But I don't know where to start. For hardware, looking at, say, a Dell Inspiron 530 ($379), it's too powerful and too expensive for what I'd use it for.

And for the OS... Windows Home Server? Ubuntu? I don't know what'd be easiest.

Ideas? Thanks!

Growable Linux hardware RAID?

Kadin2048 — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 14:36:39 -0800

How can I make a growable hardware RAID-5 Linux system? Is LVM the right choice, or am I setting myself up for trouble? Lots of geeky details follow. I'm setting up a home file server / project box. Consistent with my budget, I'm using only the finest, most sophisticated hardware … from 1998.

What I have is a Dell PowerEdge 2300. It has a PCI hardware SCSI RAID card, called the "PERC2/SC" (known to people outside Dell as the "AMI MegaRAID 466"), attached to a six-slot SCAII drive bay. Right now I have 4 74GB SCSI disks in the bay set up as a RAID-5. I want to have the option of adding more drives later on, bringing it up to 6x74GB in a RAID-5.

The card's BIOS configuration utility supports expanding the array volume by adding disks later on -- that's not a problem. But what I'm concerned about is the filesystem that I might build on top of that volume. Obviously I don't want to hose all my data when I install an additional drive and expand the array.

I've been doing some reading and it seems like LVM might be part of the answer, so to that end I installed Ubuntu-server, creating a small ext3 /boot partition and giving the rest of the free space to LVM as a physical volume. In fdisk, this looks basically like: (cutting block numbers)

Disk /dev/sda: 219.8 GB 26724 cylinders

/dev/sda1   1   26274   Extended

/dev/sda5* 1      31    Linux

/dev/sda6   32 26724 Linux LVM

I have this gut feeling that this won't work when I expand the array, and the "disk" that the LVM PV is sitting on (/dev/sda) suddenly increases in size. The fact that I can't find much information on growing a LVM physical volume isn't reassuring, either.

So, is this really the way to go? And if not, what's the best option? Should I forget LVM and just put the filesystem right down on the RAID volume directly? (I'm planning on using JFS for low CPU usage and easy online resizing, but I'm open to other suggestions.) Should I eliminate the /boot partition and turn the whole RAID volume into an LVM PV somehow?

Graphics card for Dell T105/Ubuntu machine?

Zarkonnen — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 03:52:10 -0800

LinuxNewbie/Hardware Filter: I just bought a Dell T105 server and installed Ubuntu on it. The machine is great, but graphics performance is very very bad. It only has PCI and PCIe 8x slots, no PCIe 16x ones. Is it possible to get a compatible graphics card? I know it's a server, not a desktop machine. I'm not trying to run the latest video games on it, but even 2D graphics performance is completely lacking using the onboard graphics chip. A 64 MB PCI graphics card would be good enough, it just has to be supported by Ubuntu.

I know this is a very specific and somewhat daft question, since I'm trying to use server hardware as a desktop machine, but my attempts at looking up the answer have been completely fruitless.

Where can I buy an $800 Linux Server?

phrontist — Thu, 10 May 2007 11:25:46 -0800

I need to buy a server for around $800 ($1000 as an absolute maximum). It will be hosting a website with a (PostGres) database that will start at around 4GB and grow slowly (so would like at least 2GB of RAM). It must be able run Linux, preferably Ubuntu or Debian. I go to college in Kentucky, where I work for Radio Free Lexington. I am now home in the DC area for the next three months, during which I intend to develop a custom CMS/Radio Station Management/Playlist tracking system. The problem is, I have nothing to run or develop it on.

Before I left Kentucky, I had ordered a Dell Optiplex 320. It arrived two days before I had to leave, and what I thought would be a quick and straightforward install turned out to be extremely difficult (see this thread). Even if it is possible, I'm now out of town and can only ask the minimal effort of the person who has graciously volunteered to help me out of this mess and install the replacement machine in my absence.

So I'm looking for recommendations for a "server" (whether it is billed as such by the manufacturer is not important to me) that is comparable or better to the Optiplex machine, but is well documented as being trivially Linux compatible (no kernel patching) or ships with a Linux distribution installed. It must be something I can order in the next two weeks (I know Dell is promising Ubuntu systems... but I can't wait). Dell is not out of the running, but I'm highly suspicious now.

Here are the specs of the last machine:

P4 Processor 641 (3.20GHz, 2M, 800MHz FSB)
80GB SATA HDD (the SATA controller is actually what caused the problem, so I'm somewhat wary)
2GB SDRAM
$643 before shipping.

How do I install Ubuntu on an old laptop with no CD drive?

smallerdemon — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 16:01:15 -0800

My place of employment sees a LOT of laptops come and go. Recently a PIII Dell Latitude L400 ultralight came through and was marked for surplus, but I want to use it for Ubuntu. One snag, though. I don't have the CD-ROM drive for this sucker. It's got a 30GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM, so it's a decent power old ultralight that would be wonderful for having around the house for wireless (I have a card that works with Ubuntu already).

Where and/or how do I get a free CD drive for this thing in order to get Ubuntu on it?

Failing that, how hard is a network install option (it has an ethernet port built in)? I'm just getting my feet wet on linux installs (this will be my fourth one) and they have all been CD installs so far, so a network install would be a new beast for me. Can anyone point me to a decent FAQ on how I would go about doing that?

Ubuntu help?

lilboo — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:54:05 -0800

I switched from Windows XP to Ubuntu one month ago. Everything was working perfectly well until this week, but now I am having keyboard problems. I think this might have something to do with a system update that I installed this week, but since I'm a real Linux newbie, I'm not totally sure (hence this post.)

BTW, I don't want to switch back to XP; other than this, I have been really happy with the all-over improved performance of my machine since making the switch.

The scenario is this: I am working on a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. When typing I somehow activate caps lock, without actually hitting the caps lock key. Deactivating caps lock (hitting the caps lock key) doesn't have any effect, and I end up having to restart the machine.

I guess I can roll back the changes, but before I do that, I wanted to ask about it here. [& I have tried the forums, but I'm not finding the info I need.]