Choosing to install turns off laptop. HD is untouched.

[Fabian Anklam]

> > First of all HP purchased Compaq a while ago, and when the sale was
> > completed they dumped the Netserver line, servers from them are
> > now HP Proliants. (Proliant was the Compaq line)
> 
> Are they as good as their HP and Compaq predecessors?

We recently had a Proliant DL380 for testing, seemed like solid
hardware, literally, the server management CD for preparing the system
for different flavors of OSes just worked as it was supposed to, neat
integrated systems management solutions. Fine hardware from what I
could tell in the little time I had with it and OEM solutions that
seemed actually usefull.

> > The Netservers and Proliants in general never had touble with FreeBSD.
> > Considering they certified them with Solaris/Netware/etc. they had to
> > be pretty standard.
> 
> Compaq Proliants had a lot of weird stuff running on the server, as I
> recall.  As long as you stuck to the OEM versions it ran fine, but if
> you tried to wipe the machine and install a vanilla OS, things went
> wrong.

The usual (old) Compaq problems reside in the system partion (or
rather lack thereof) and for the Desktops in the less than mediocre
BIOS. For the older PL servers a server management boot CD is usually
all you need to get whatever you want running, for the Desktops it
usually involves hunting down some firmware upgrades and boot disks to
restore the system partition, nothing out of the ordinary.

My FreeBSD box runs on a Deskpro EP 400 desktop coupled with a
SMART2/SL RAID controller ripped out of a PL1600 - you can love or
hate compaq, but their hardware was rock-solid.