Dell PowerEdge 2200 « modelrail.otenko

14Jan/260

Dell PowerEdge 2200

This beast seems to have had a hard life and needed a bit of skewing to get it back into shape. I saw it on the usual auction site, from a seller nearby, and my offer was accepted! It seems nobody wanted it, as the seller had mentioned it was EISA and that standard ISA cards wouldn't work... little did they know!

The Dell PowerEdge 2200 contains a Dual Pentium II FX motherboard with EISA and PCI slots. Not much IO on the rear meant I could finally utilise one of the many USB cards sitting in the junk box! The case itself turned out to be not-quite plumb, so it received a few taps of love to get it as-square-as-possible.

I didn't wait to boot it up and, as expected (and mentioned by the seller), it came up fine. 256mb of RAM and a single CPU. It did keep throwing the following error though:

After replacing the CMOS battery and saving CMOS settings, I had assumed the error would have pissed-off, but it didn't? A quick google instructed me that this was the EISA bus reporting an error, which seems to be a secondary configuration requiring a boot-floppy configurator. You'll find the EXE (which writes a floppy for you) over here, even though it mentions that it is for a 2100.

How cute is that? Dell still has support for this machine! Either way, the configuration was saved, as there was no EISA to configure, and the error went away!

More CPU

The machine only had one 333mhz CPU installed, with a terminator in the second slot. I google'd, checking what CPU speeds were available in the Deschutes Pentium II line and managed to procure two 450mhz units. Turns out though, that due to the motherboard having an FX chipset, it's 66mhz bus meant it peaked at 333mhz. Hence why the existing CPU was only 333mhz. Even funnier, the jumpers on the motherboard only indicate 233mhz and 266mhz settings?

Turns out that RSVD1 = 300mhz and RSVD2 = 333mhz! I'd actually already bought 2 matching 450mhz CPUs, and so they went in. Prior to that though, since I'd bought one without a heatsink, I had to use the one off the existing 333mhz CPU. I must admit, too much effort was required on the old heatsink!

I had to actually go and buy a solid new torx driver. I only attempted this after finding that this is the internet and people have already struggled... and triumphed! I actually had to hammer the screwdriver into the screws to be able to turn them without stripping the heads.

The CPUs were individually tested and then installed, happily underclocked. Of course, this was short-lived when the BIOS reported the following issue:

I needed a second CPU thermostat!... so I tried to work out how the existing one worked. It happened to be a directly-wired AD22103K, of which are mildly unobtanium. I went full-dodge and ordered it with a few EPROMs from China.

I wired it up as per the other themister and, well, the BIOS stopped complaining!?

More RAM

The Retro Web's page on the 2200 specifies EDO SDRAM and so I hunted down the box'o'junk. Of course... I had nothing that looked like the existing DIMM:

Lots of RAM was found, but the middle slot didn't seem to align?

I wonder what that middle slot specifies. Either way, I managed to find 3 more 64mb sticks...

Which then totalled 457772mb!

Nice. That means we're 256 + 64 + 64 + 64 (aka 512 - 64)... which is great as Win98 hates 512 and above.

Filling the EISA slots

There ain't much available for EISA slots on the marketplaces. I managed to hunt down a 10/100 Ethernet card, to free a PCI slot...

And then a second SCSI card, to provide an external SCSI port...

They all installed cleanly, with the SCSI card taking up the entire depth of the case! I think that's the first time I've ever used the plastic supports on the right of any AT/ATX case. You'll need the EISA configuration disk and then any relevant configuration files. The SCSI card worked from the configs already on-disk, but the ethernet needed a download.

One note for the SCSI card was that I needed to set it from Standard Mode to Enhanced Mode via the EISA Configuration Disk. I spent a lot of time trying to find DOS drivers for the card, until I realised that EISA is 'all powerful' and all settings are done via CFG files and the system-in-question's EISA configurator!

Windows 98 SE

Everything just worked! Quite amazing, really. The SCSI card needed a "find non-PNP hardware", as it was installed after Windows and is not PNP, despite being EISA.

Of course, Windows 98 doesn't use the second CPU, so mildly useless! It's bloody quick though... it takes more time to count RAM than it then does to get to the network login prompt.

Windows 2000 and XP

Win2K hates EISA! I suppose I could install a PCI network card just for it, but that'd sorta ruin the experience. Same goes for XP... but they do run well!

BeOS 5.0

Installed and worked perfectly.

The teapot spun and the CPU graphs danced!

Redhat 6.2

The HP J2577A 100VG EISA Ethernet card didn't work straight away, but this article at HPE's support forum indicated that I needed to insmod hp100, and?...

Yey! Adding the alias to /etc/conf.modules didn't quite get it loaded on boot... so I used linuxconf and then client -> local settings to get the adapter enabled and set up.