Installing Windows XP Pro on Dell PowerEedge 2950 Server

Yesterday at work we finally received our 2 brand new PE 2950 servers from Dell. We want to set up a mini, 2 node, Linux cluster with them and it is my job to do this. As I have never set up a cluster before, I took this on as a personal and a professional challenge.

I realized that by doing this I am actually learning a lot about Linux, networking, clustering and computers in general. So thats why I opened this blog to keep track of things I learn here and in the future.

First, here’s the description of what I’m working with. One machine will serve as a master node and the other as slave node. Master node has a 146 GB SAS drive (10K rmp), and the slave has a single 80 GB SATA-3G drive (7,2K rpm). Those are really the only differences between the two nodes. They both have a single dual core Intel Xenon 5150 2.66 GHz processor and 2GB or RAM @ 667 MHz. The machines were bought from Dell and they arrived in 7 business days as expected.

My ultimate goal is to set up a Linux cluster with the 2 machines, but I also wanted to have the ability to run Windows XP on both of them. Windows is useful to us at work as we have a lot of windows based applications only. So, my plan was to first install XP on both machines, and then install Linux on a separate partitions so that I can dual-boot each machine.

Its too late now to explain exactly what I did to install XP on both servers, but I will write more tomorrow.

Ok, after connecting the master node, I turned it on and put the XP installation CD into the CD-ROM. I would get the blue screen and I had to wait untill all of the drivers are loaded. But, then something unexpected happened. I received an error message saying that XP cannot be installed because no hard drive was detected. Of course I immediately tried to do this one more time to make sure its not a fluke. It wasn’t.

After a bit of googling I realized that XP does not have the drivers for the SAS 5/i integrated controller for my SATA HD. So I needed an XP driver for this. I first looked to at the drivers CD that came with the machines, but they only had drivers for windows 2000, and windows 2003 server edition. I didn’t really know where to get the drivers online so i used the win 2000 driver and gave it a try.

I read online that you have to put the new driver onto a floppy and press F6 right after XP starts the installation, so that way XP can read the driver from a floppy. Thats what i did. This seemed to work. XP was able to recognize the HD and I proceded to install it in a normal way.

At the end of the install process the machine normally reboots itself and boots directly off HD and installation is finalized. However, during the boot process my machine crashed and I got a blue screen asking me if I want to boot the windows in the safe mode. I tried but with same result.

I thought about trying the 2003 server edition drivers but then I thought of looking up the solution on Dell’s community forums. I left this post. I also asked some people for help on #windows IRC channel on freenode. I realized that I needed a XP driver for the SAS controller so I looked onto LSI’s web site, which is the company that makes these contnrollers. There, I found the following XP driver and I redid my installation using it.

That did the trick. Now I have a fully functioning win xp on a Dell PE 2950 server, which saved us a lot of money because we don’t really need the Windows server edition for anything we do.