Month: December 2015

Solved – Dell Optiplex 790 2nd HDD disk drive not found in Windows 10 Disk Management but BIOS sees the drive

disk

I have a Dell Optiplex I’m putting together for an IP Camera security system. The security cameras use a lot of disk space, so I connected a 2nd Seagate 2TB drive to the black SATA port labeled SATA1. The BIOS sees the drive, but when I logged into Windows 10 and looked in Disk Management, the drive wasn’t found. If the new hard drive isn’t in Disk Management, but the BIOS does see the drive, there’s something wrong with either the BIOS / SATA / RAID configuration, or there’s something wrong with the drive itself. I attempted to Scan for Hardware Changes in the Device Manager – no luck. I also went into Disk Management -> Action -> Rescan Disks -> no luck.

Here is the SATA Port layout:

SATA 0 (Blue) – Primary HDD 500GB Seagate ST3500413AS

SATA 1 (Black) – Secondary  HDD 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164

SATA 2 (White) – CD / DVD

SATA 3 (White) – empty

I went to Dell’s support website, ran the System Detect (for some reason entering the Service Tag didn’t work) and then went to look at the available drivers. I was thinking of updating the BIOS from A09 to A18, but then noticed under Serial ATA there is a Seagate Firmware update named B765JC49.zip – unpacked is 2 folders, DOS and Windows, in the Windows folder is the file B7032100.exe – this is the file I installed. During the setup, the computer is restarted, and like most firmware utilities (I love these), you get a nice old-school 8-bit text interface with a resounding SUCCESS in big blue letters when it’s done.

So this was really all I did, and after flashing the Seagate Firmware, and logging into windows, immediately the drive was detected and prompted me to initialize and format the disk. So I did just that; initialized the drive as MBR, then changed the CD-ROM to drive letter E:, and formatted the new drive as NTFS on drive letter D: labelled as “Data”. Life is good again. Hopefully this post will be found by someone else having difficulty when their computer doesn’t see the new 2nd disk drive and save them a little time and frustration in the process.

 

Modern PHP development environment – Setup of Ansible, pycharm, sourcetree and workflow with bitbucket

When getting started with development with a cloud repository such as git, it may be a little daunting to decide how to get started. With some help from an associate, I put together a short simple guide to setup a development environment on OS X. I hope this information provides someone with a good start to development with bitbucket, version control, and PHP Development in conjunction with a cloud repository.

Bitbucket is similar to git, but allows free repos. We prefer to use bitbucket for a repository of code so that we can manage changes to our ubuntu servers and files. Bitbucket is the “Book of Truth” and will be the keeper of all files and things that are good. Ansible runs on a dedicated management ubuntu server and pushes out changes (playbooks) to either a single, a few, or all of our linux servers. Either way, with pull/push of data from our code repository, we can control what is deployed on our systems, an use our repo as our backup. If a server dies, we can setup a new system, and pull in the good data.

Setup

First, you need a bitbucket account and sign-on. Once signed on to https://bitbucket.org/brooksinstitute/ You should be able to create your first repo. You might want to create your own private repo for notes, configs etc. As mentioned earlier, bitbucket is where we keep our known-good source code, and changes to this should only be done from your own computer’s copy of the repo, and only changed with commits – more on this later.

sourcetree

Next on your local machine, download sourcetree https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

Once downloaded and installed, tell sourcetree where your repos live at bitbucket (simple username/password login).

Next, SourceTree will ask you which remote repository you want to clone to your local machine. You want to clone the remote repos on bitbucket so that you can make changes to your local versions before you commit them back to bitbucket. If you work with a group of developers you will probably want someone to review your files before you commit. You should also “checkout” local copies within pycharm, if someone else will also be working on your local files.

pycharm

Now it’s time to install and configure pycharm Community Edition https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/ . Pycharm is a Development Environment (IDE) that provides code completion, nice pretty colors and integrates with VCS/Git to do versioning control of your local (cloned) repo. In Pycharm, you want to go to the File → Open menu, browse your local machine, and choose the root folder of the cloned repo of your choice. This will get you to the point where you can begin to edit files.

ansible

Ansible http://www.ansible.com/ is a management utility that helps you easily manage systems and deploy apps. Here is some introductory documentation http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_getting_started.html. Ansible usually runs on a dedicated Admin server, and this is the server that issues commands or “playbooks”. Although your Admin server contains the ansible playbook files, we only want to make changes to the files linked to the bitbucket repo before we pull them into the Admin server and then execute the commands.

 

Vagrant

Vagrant https://www.vagrantup.com/ provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments built on top of industry-standard technology and controlled by a single consistent workflow to help maximize productivity. First download, install, and run VirtualBox https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads , then open a terminal, and startup a vagrant “box” with the following:

   $ vagrant init hashicorp/precise32
   $ vagrant up

Vagrant will download and install the ‘precise32’ “box”. And now, in virtualbox you will see the new virtual machine. Then next from the command line you can issue the command ‘vagrant ssh’ which will open a shell to your new precise32 vm. You can use this vm to test your configurations and playbooks against before you roll them out to your production servers.

Workflow

When you’ve changed something in your local (cloned) repo, and you want to have that become the “truth” on bitbucket, do the following:

  1. Open the file from your local repo in pycharm (double-click on the file icon in the menu tree)
  2. Edit the file
  3. When done editing, right-click on the file → Git → Commit file
  4. Now you want to push this edited file up to bitbucket. Review the code, make comments and then push.