I’ve got a Prosignia 300 what is it? How do I get started?

I got an email from Mike the other day. He’s inherited a Compaq Prosignia 300. Mike attends one of the universities in London and wondered what he could do with the server “what are the specs?” “Can I run windows 2003 on it?” “Is there anything I should know about it?” “How do you get drivers?” My reply is below.

“Hi Mike

Great welcome to the server club, great news that you’ve got your first server. The Compaq Prosignia 300 is a bit of an old box, but if you’re wanting to get familiar with servers in general, or it’s probably still fine as a file server, though memory fails me in terms of the exact specs. Anyway, the following information should help:

Drivers – http://www.hp.com/support – http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?prodNameId=257774?=en&cc=us&taskId=135&prodClassId=-1&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=254924 is the exact url to download them

Specifications – http://h18003.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/North_America_10-1997/50025_na.PDF -I’ve played with one before, it was a Pentium 90 I believe.

Operating systems – looking at the HP site it can run up to NT4, you might get away with Windows 2000 dependent on the memory and disk space, NT will probably run quite well, or you could check out linux, it should have the drivers you need.
Notes – the firmware can be downloaded from the driver page, check that’s up to date before you start installing the operating system, that should prevent any issues, there is an erase utility to reset everything to default, but you might not find that necessary. Looking at the site it states the drivers are up to 4.8, you can download and install for example 6.1Â which are the latest Compaq/HP drivers for Windows NT, however they will probably use more memory and load features which aren’t supported by your hardware.

To install Windows NT4, you’ll need the driver disk for the array controller and network card, but otherwise the install should go through fine without any issues.

If you have any problems, drop me a mail and good luck with your new server.

regards

Martin

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