martin939 wrote:

I got my hands on an almost pristine HP TC3100 server, seems like a perfect candidate for a retro gaming PC for me. It has: […]
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I got my hands on an almost pristine HP TC3100 server, seems like a perfect candidate for a retro gaming PC for me. It has:

- 2x Pentium III-S 1266MHz
- 2x512MB + 256MB SDRAM ECC PC133 CL3
- A plethora of PCI slots and 2x PCI-X
- 320W Delta PSU

It's also very quiet, the only issue is that I can't get to install any OS it. Why? Windows XP CD gives a blinking underscore, then the screen goes grey and you can hear the CD / HDD reading something but there is no display.
I've already tried the onboard ATI Rage XL and my GF4 MX4000 PCI aswell.

It also has the dreaded SCSI HDD's, 18 and 36GB...it's running Windows server 2003 Enterprise but I don't have the password.

Wow. I had a Dell PowerEdge 6300 Server in 2012 that had 2x Intel Pentium II Xeon 400 Processors in them (Slot 2), 4x 256MB SD-RAM (Server) 3x PSUs (guessing 320W or lower), 2x 18.6GB Fujitsu (Compaq) 10K RPM Ultra II SCSI drives, 3x Seagate 73.4GB 15K Ultra III SCSI drives, SCSI 24x CD Drive, 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Drive, ATI Rage XL, Intel Pro/100 PCI Ethernet, and it was louder than the field exercise helicopter flying above my house. Unfortunately, the system's PSUs died, but I still have the drives (minus the CD drive) and processors.

My plans are to get an Ultra II SCSI controller PCI (not PCI-X) card, cable, and at least one SCSI PCB for the hard drives and use it in a desktop computer as a NAS box with the 3 Seagate drives + 2 Compaq (Fujitsu) drives set for the RAID 5, and the rest of the 3 Seagate drive space for the RAID 5. The boot up drive will consist of a CF card for the OS only.

I have one of these. Sounds like a faulty optical drive. Are other CDs playing OK?

But note: I last used it in August and experienced various strange system malfunctions, including weird optical disk errors. It turned out to be overheating, probably the memory modules, which were running very hot (painful to touch). I removed 2 of the 4 modules and the problems went away (the arrival of September probably helped too.)

Booting from the optical drive may be disabled in bios.

It was a HDD issue, somehow it needed the 2 SCSI drives to be formatted first? After that, Windows XP installed perfectly.
I wonder if it'll install Windows 98SE too for DOS games and then I'll just swap the HDD's (I have the hotswap version) to the OS I want to use at the time.
Thanks to the 10k RPM 36GB it's still pretty snappy but oh man these things are LOUD.

I need to sort out the internal SCSI controller issue, when I populate the PCI/PCI-X slots the SCSI controller disappears...

The whole thing runs pretty cool, I've also replaced the TIM on both CPU's.

Brassicgamer also has one of these. He has also some videos up on the youtubes of it.

It was made in two versions, one with hot swap drives and another with cold swap drives (i.e. you have to open up the case to replace drives). I used to have one of each, but due to space issues I dismantled the cold swap unit and threw away the case.

The Dell server I had used the hotswap drive configuration and up to 8 SCSI hard drives could be installed in it.

Pros:
When the controller initializes, one drive turns on, then it goes to the next one & turns it on, and repeats until it's done detecting the drives.
Can be setup as a RAID (5 being the most) and if one drive fails using RAID 5, the other drives will still work, but swapping the broken drive is a must for data reasons.
Can be hotswap capable, depending on the server and case setup.

Cons:
Noisy
Requires special adapters (Ultra SCSI)
Terminating adapter is required

I assume the OP's machine didn't come with a RAID card. One of mine came with a NetRAID-1M which supports a single SCSI channel. I think that was the officially supported RAID card for this model.

Mine only has the dual channel onboard SCSI controller, LSI 53c1010-66.

You can reset the windows password pretty easy
https://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd

We want pics when closer to been finished!

I will post some tomorrow. Installed a "new" Fujistu Ultra 320 SCSI drive, Jesus these 15k RPM drives still pack quite a punch - 5.7ms seek time 😮

I can't seem to go over 75MB/s throughput on any of my U320 drives, I thought an Ultra 160 controller would run @ max 160MB/s?