NASLite Network Attached Storage

What a long, strange trip it’s been:

Sorry for the long post. It may help others, just as previous posts helped me.
Background: I was setting up a NASLite+ USB v1.5 appliance with 4, 80GB drives harvested from other systems into a Pentium 4, 1.4GHz, 850 chipset. 256MB (remember RIMM?). The system supports full-speed USB (often referred to as USB 1.1). I am using a Lexar Media 16MB USB full-speed device.

First Challenge: Tried to determine if my NAS system will boot from USB. I tried the USB boot utility from the HP website as noted in other docs, but to no avail. I tried on my workstation (P4, High-speed USB aka USB 2.0, also unsuccessful). Next, I tried booting the workstation with the NASLite+ USB v1.5 CD and creating a superfloppy or partition on the USB device, received the error “…failed to initialize” or equivalent. Then, I read the forum. I noted cases where there was success swapping USB drives between full- and high-speed interfaces. I tried the USB device on my NAS system. After I disconnected a HDD drive and connected a CD-ROM, then booted with the NASLite+ USB v1.5 CD (made from downloaded image) with the same USB device connected, I was able to create a bootable USB drive.
Lesson: Work on the hardware you’re going to use, not a proxy, and read the forums.

Second Challenge: The NAS system BIOS had IDE settings for Auto Detect, User, None and some others. I set all the drives to None. The system booted from the USB drive, but no HDDs were detected by NASLite+ for USB. When I set BIOS back to Auto, the system booted Windows from one of the drives (they came from other systems upgrades). I tried using the kicker floppy, but that hung after displaying the Caldera Dr. DOS message. My BIOS did not have a setting to force boot from USB. It seemed logical that it booted from USB before because there was no detected bootable partition on any drive. I booted from a startup diskette and used FDISK to remove all the existing partitions from the HDDs. The drive with Windows that the system booted to before did not have a partition that FDISK recognized, so there was nothing to erase, so I created a DOS partition to get rid of what was there. When I tried again, the system found that partition (instead of the USB drive) and tried to boot, generating a “missing operating system” error. So, it was back to FDISK to delete that partition. On the next boot, the system booted from USB, found all the HDDs (with BIOS set to Auto) and I was able to complete the NASLite+ for USB setup.
Lesson: Delete existing partitions before you start, it will save a lot of time.

Third Challenge: Most of the systems on my network are part of the same (Windows) workgroup and I had no trouble mapping to NAS drives. However, my work laptop is part of a domain and I could not map drives. I could access the NASLite+ for USB system on that laptop using telnet. I tried the various fixes in the forums but could not get those to work. I also found that I could access the NAS using Mozilla and FTP, but not IE, nor could I get to it with http. I decided not to mess with the settings on the laptop so added the FireFTP plugin for Mozilla which works just fine.
Lesson: It works, know when to quit.

Despite all the challenges, I’m happy with the overall results. I have a 320GB NAS made from hardware castoffs from previous upgrades so my only expense was NASLite+ for USB software. If you’re having trouble, don’t give up, just read the forums and try something different. You can’t expect to lash together all kinds of obsolete stuff and have it work like a factory-engineered system the first time. And remember, the definition of insanity is “doing things the same way and expecting different results”.

Regards,
justbob