Overlooking the world of SBS2003 and Office Systems 2003

Disaster in the Making

Hoof in Mouth Disease -- A highly infectious brain disease characterized by statements beginning with "If I upgrade this part of my computer system, then I can easily do <fill in the blank>."  and "If a 40-gig drive costs just $10 more that a 20-gig drive, than that is a really good deal and I should go for it"

I fought off this disease for the better part of a year after I joined a private newslist of Outlook developers and testers.  But, it must have been lying dormant, because when I saw a new product called "Trios", it attacked with amazing virulence.  I could have my production system and my test environments, too.  But it was all held in abeyance by cost.  That last defense crumbled when 20-gig hard drive prices dropped below $100.  Then, it was a question of shopping long and hard to find 7200 rpm drives for that good price.  Unfortunately, they appeared.  But worse, there was a coupon for 40-gig drives that would cost just $10 more.  Now the disease surged into full expression and I staggered over the lip of the slippery slope that leads to full system disaster.  I was never even aware that the slope changed--the disease has developed a new Varilux mind-lense that completely obscures the difference in slope.  All slopes look flat.  But, after that first click of the buy button, it got steeper and steeper, and it was a long way down to the bottom.

Beware the Lure of the Extra Gigabyte, or 10 or 20.

A drive is a drive is a drive.  You plug it into a cable that fits in a slot in the MotherBoard and access is managed by the Mobo's bios chips.  You only run into troubles when you climb over the limit of 4--two cable slots and two drives per cable.  At least this is the simple view in the Eide world, in which I am playing.  I would have had too many drives, except I was employing the Trios "switch", which only presents one of it's three drives to the system at a time.  So, I could have the Trios drive, the CDR drive, and two other drives on the system with no problems.  So I buy my three 40-gig drives, the Trios package, give it to my hardware shop, and expected just a 1/2 hour charge to get it set up.  I knew they would have to use some kind of a cage to mount the drives, so expected a little for that, also.

Now, I understand that the capabilities of the MotherBoard are not a part of the disease.  They were fixed when I bought it, long before I was infected.  And it is only coincidental that they bared their teeth and bit hard, exactly at the time that my hoof in mouth disease had become virulent.  But the shop guys called me and said that every time they plugged in one of my drives, the system locked up.  They finally concluded that the Mobo could not handle anything above 32-gig drives.  I would have to use a controller board.  The slope get steeper.  How much is that? $37.  Go for it!  Then they say, "Of course, you will have to re-install your system because NT does not like such changed."  They had a real difficult time getting NT to install on the new Trios disk, and I couldn't do it at all when I set out to duplicate what they had done.  The end result:  5 hours of shop time, plus parts, and I get back a computer box that doesn't run.  And didn't run for a long time as I had to learn all over again the really nasty details of installing custom mass storage controllers and custom NIC drivers and getting them to work with NT and then SBS.  

This is a pretty common outcome of a bout with Hoof in Mouth disease.  Unfortunately, it has chronic aspects, that you discover as you recover use of the system.  First and foremost, it is a new install of SBS, which means that the server has a new SID and is a dangerous stranger to all your client workstations.  I will discuss the problems encountered with the components of SBS on other pages.

Send mail to Hollis@outlookbythesound.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: October 31, 2003