Bye Bye D810, Hello D820
I got a new Dell D820 machine last week and had to give up my Dell D810. The 810 has been very good to me. I have used it for the last couple of years (with 2GB RAM) and I cannot really complain about its performance and reliability. So I was a bit hesitant. But I could not pass on a dual core 4GB RAM machine, now could I.
My first mission was to ensure that my existing HDD configs would work on the D820 - and this turned out to be quite a task. The D810 shipped with IDE based drives and the D820 has a SATA based drive. Luckily I had a media bay, and after some battles with a screwdriver I was able to get my old drive into the media bay. You can than boot from the media bay. This though was just the start of my hassles.
With the D810 being recognized as a single proc HAL and the D820 being recognized as a multiproc HAL, I kept on getting the dreaded blue screen of death. I knew a recovery might work but the problem I had was the media bay was taking up the DVD slot. Finally, I managed to get an external USB based DVD which I could boot from. After doing a repair it looks like those old HDDs work great still (i had to fixup some account issues with Local Service) - although I still need to fully test. The one thing to be aware of is that when you do the recovery you must re-enter the product key and activate as soon as possible. With my own drive I did not enter the key initially and then hassles activating as my network cards was not installed. For the first time I went down the route of a telephonic activation and it was not too bad at all.
Right now I am busy setting up the new SATA drive with the usual stuff (WS03,VS, SQL etc) and will use this for TechED. Quite a busy month ahead.