Bluebottle's blog

setting up a home server with an old work laptop

A couple of months ago I got an old mini pc from work. Because of where I work, the hard drives are destroyed before any old tech is given to employees. So I've been procrastinating on this for awhile. I'm also not great with hardware and systems stuff in general - I'm a software developer who primarily works on windows.

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I had an old 3.5" hard drive I intended to install in this mini PC, but it turns out because it's a mini PC it only takes smaller hard drives (duh) so I bought a 2.5" SSD (solid state drive) from ebuyer.

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Meet Crisps (all the machines in our work are named after food, at the moment. This was an old meeting room PC so they got named after sharing food - we had Crisps, Tapas and Taco!)

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Here he is once I've opened him up (and inserted the SSD - I forgot to take a picture before) This was pretty straightforward, but I used this video to make sure I was doing the right thing.

(I forgot how fiddly working with tiny screws is, so I used a trick I remembered from my Dad and put a tiny bit of bluetak on the end of the screwdriver to hold the screw in place initially, when I screwed the SSD in place.)

Then I closed Crisps back up and tried booting him. I initially got this message "PXE-E61 MEDIA TEST FAILURE, CHECK CABLE", which I think is because it was still set up to boot from the old hard drive.

I resolved this by going into the BIOS (you press "Delete" as the computer is starting up to do this on American Megatrends hardware). I then had to update the boot options to tell it to boot from the SSD I just installed.

This took some trial and error - there were several boot options and I didn't really understand the difference. But eventually I got to this point.

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This makes sense as there is not bootable media on the hard drive I installed. The next step will be to boot a Linux installation from a pen drive, and use that to install Linux...

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