WHS Hacks: Installing Windows Home Server on the Thecus N5200
Posted by Jaymz, April 8th, 2009 in Hardware, Home Server, Software, Tech, Windows
After my last home server project ended with tears, I decided that my next system was going to be somewhat smaller, portable, use significantly less power and have no more than four or five drives.
However, money has been somewhat tight for me of late, and I’ve had to make do with no home server to store all my crap, or have the benefit of daily C: backups for all my Windows machines. I had all my media stored locally on my main PC, and backed it up weekly to my trusty Thecus N5200. I read somewhere that it’s possible to hack these things to run a slightly more powerful Linux, when it suddenly struck me - low power, 5 drives, small and portable. Okay, the 600MHz CPU kinda sucks, but damn. It’s almost all I need.
So I did it, and according to my somewhat extensive Google-fu, I think I’m the first person to actually succeed.
So without further ado, I present to you my Thecus N5200 Windows Home Server (in progress):
How the hell did I do it? Well, I did a bit of research into the hardware first. The mainboard and network cards are fairly stock standard Intel stuff, so that’s not a worry - the biggest concern was the custom SATA controller - which is apparently a Marvell MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller. Thankfully, this chip is used on the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8. I’ve included where to get this driver from the list of other hardware components needed.
So, to hack the N5200, you’ll need:
- A DB15 HD PCB (or surface) right angle mount. It looks like this:
With a bit of fiddling - you attach this to the spare spot next to the serial port. Don’t worry about popping the hole out on the backplate, or soldering it in - it won’t quite fit with the case on. You won’t need it after you finish installing it, so just keep it there with electrical tape, or try balance it in a way so it’ll hold steady.
- A USB external DVD drive of some kind. After discovering that I couldn’t get my N5200 to boot from my two USB thumb drives, I had to resort to gutting an old USB IDE drive enclosure, and hooking a DVD-ROM drive up to it.
- A USB thumb drive with the drivers listed below.
- USB keyboard and mouse. Keep in mind that there are only 3 USB ports on the N5200, so you’ll either need a hub of some kind, or go mouseless during the initial part of the install (brush up on your keyboard shortcuts!).
- A 512MB DDR DIMM to replace the crappy 256MB DIMM. If you own the N5200 Pro, Thecus were kind enough to do this for you already.
- The knowledge that this is voiding the hell out of any warranty you’ve got left
Drivers you’ll need:
- The SATA Controller drivers can be found here.
- The Network card drivers can be found here (for the 2-port version)
Drivers missing:
- Video (some kind of Intel onboard thing, supposed to be an 852GM, but won’t install).
- NetChip USB Controller 2282. I assume this is the USB-host port on the back. Can’t find drivers for this.
- I have no idea how to get the LED display to do anything, or respond to button presses. It forever says “Self testing…”
So here’s what you do. First, you need to pull the N5200 apart. There are three screws on the back, which allow you to slide the cover, and remove the backplate. When removing the backplate, watch out for the fan that’s attached to it, and be sure to disconnect it from the SATA backplate.
On the mainboard, you remove the big “Thecus N5200_RJ45″ board that resides above the serial port, by taking out the two screws, and carefully pulling it towards you. You then place the DB15 HD connector onto the board, positioning all those little FUCKING BASTARD pins into the correct holes. I found positioning the back row first, and then using a small flathead screwdriver to help adjust the front row to slide in helped. Be sure not to accidently bend any of the little FUCKING BASTARD pins out of shape. Tape it down with some electrical tape, or try position the VGA cable so it’s not pulling on the DB15 connector too much.
Remove the little 64MB (or 256MB in the case of the Pro) flash drive. Keep it somewhere safe, just in case. If all goes well, we won’t be needing it. While you’re there, be sure to replace the RAM with a 512MB DIMM if you’re stuck with the standard N5200 like me.
Hook up the monitor and watch it boot. To make things easy, just have the one SATA drive in there - whichever drive you want SYS to be on. Hit DEL to get into the BIOS, in order to change the boot volume. Under “Advanced” (second option), go to the boot order. Set the first to USB-CDROM, the second and third to Disabled, and ensure “Allow other devices to boot” or whatever it’s called is ENABLED.
Connect your USB DVD drive, and go through the usual motions of installing Home Server. Be sure to place the SATA drivers at least onto a USB thumb drive, and make sure it’s unextracted (you see INF’s and sys files, not one large ZIP). When Home Server setup complains it can’t find a hard drive, select “Load Drivers”, slap the USB drive in, and continue with setup until finished. Be sure to load the NIC drivers once finished, and verify you can remote into the server via Remote Desktop, before pulling out all the cables and crap, and placing the case back together again. Install the rest of your drives, and away you go.
I’ll have to get back to you all on how it actually performs - the SATA controller and gigabit ethernet should be fairly quick, but the 600MHz CPU in the stock N5200 could hamper performance. The N5200 Pro should alleviate those worries with the 1.5GHz processor, at least. I’ll be sure to report back on how unbearingly slow and painful it is.
This page gave me the idea of using the DB15 VGA connector, and also alerted me as to what kind of drivers I’d need to look for.
This site was also an interesting read, despite being entirely in German.
There might be a way somewhere amongst those two sites to get the front LED to do something.
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Hello and welcome to Respect Sakura, yet another shitty blog under the premise of being an animu blog, when it's really just about Jaymz's tech leanings, spending habits and crack-inspired ramblings on topics noone cares about. Oh, and that other guy posts stuff sometimes, too.
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Very interesting article. Amazing what one can do with a bit of imagination and perseverance.
I’ve got a feeling that LCD display is a crystalfontz device.
Try a crystalfontz driver to see if you can get it working.
Great hack! Is the CPU upgradable on the non-Pro version?
Without a doubt, one of the coolist projects I’ve seen in the past few months.
Unfortunately not, it seems.
I did think to grab an old, dead Pentium M notebook from work, in order to swap out the CPU - but alas, the thing is soldered directly onto the board.
From Tweaktown’s review of the Pro, it at least looks like it’s socketed, so the Pro version may be a better one to go for.
@ymboc, Tried a couple of tools to talk to COM2 (the German N5200 page references to /dev/ttyS1). No go, it seems.
I can probably take it apart at some stage, and try to find some identifying mark.
Great work, Dude!
Unfortunately it doesn’t work on N5200 Pro.
Everything works fine. Installation runs properly. But we can’t boot from the internal SATA-Drive. Seems the BIOS can’t see the controller!
Are you sure you’ve got “Boot from other device” enabled in the BIOS, after checking the boot order?
The other way to tell if it will boot or not, is to see if the SATA controller actually lists any drives, after the initial BIOS screen. If not, and you can verify that it’s the same controller as the N5200, you could try flash the SATA controller’s boot ROM with the one on this page:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm
Doing so is a VERY risky thing to try, however and could potentially do Very Bad Things(tm).
Have you Thecus 5200 Motherboard Ver 1.0 or Ver 2.0?
Hi,
I’m trying something similar on my 5200 but using Server 2008 by connecting a laptop drive instead of the flash drive (mine was 128mb!?), managed to install from USB Stick (USB-HDD setting in bios), just tried to install the drivers listed above, they show up as an adaptec… but fails to start. Any ideas?
By the way i got a 1gb stick to work thanks to a guy on proboards thecus forums.
Cheers
Johner
1gb upgrade
http://thecususergroup.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=n5200modifications&action=display&thread=2936
I have just done the same thing, the hard thing was to find the VGA HD DB15 for 5200 Motherboard Ver 2.0, I looked that openfiler running on a 2GB DOM then changed it to a 160GB IDE drive with 10″ 44 pin cable running WHS
Wish I found your page frist lol
Thanks
Dave
You can use the Sun Fire X4500 marvell drivers work great and they are current. Still haven’t worked out the UBS drivers aswell.
dave, do you have a link to the x4500 sata drivers? will they work with 2008 server?
I have use this driver.
http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/yhst-49197280893764/CGS-6081-8X.zip
Thecus run witch Notebook 40GB HDD. I know WHS install need 60gb. But i have first install WHS on the first SATA HDD and clone to the Notebook hdd.
whs would not boot from SATA hdd.
Driver from “link” dont work be me.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm
Thanks Niko, i’ll give this a go with server 2008 and report back.
Installation on a N5200 PRO is possible!
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK:
* Boot the N5200 Pro with DOS from USB stick
* Save original N5200 BiOS
- I use awdflash.exe Version 8.89
- use commandline “awdflash.exe /pn /sy”
- save as N5200.bin
* edit original N5200 BiOS on a other computer
- i use CBROM V6.06 from BNTBTC “Borg Number Two’s BIOS Tools Collection”
- add AOC-SAT2-MV8 Controller Bios
- download and rename the AOC-SAT2-MV8 BiOS to mv8.rom
- use commandline “CBROM606.EXE N5200.BIN /PCI mv8.rom”
- see http://www.hackernotcracker.com/2008-10/controller-card-detection-at-boot-post-modflash-the-bios-rom-firmware.html
- save the new N5200.BIN to the USB stick
* Boot the N5200 Pro with DOS from USB stick
- update the N5200 Pro Bios with awdflash.exe and the new N5200.BIN
* Install Windows HomeServer how described ;-)
Yeah matey sorry didn’t check back on the web site since I have it working great now.
You can use this one Tempo Serial ATA PCIe/PCI-X Family Drivers (Windows)
Windows Vista, Server 2003, and XP
http://www.sonnettech.com/support/downloads/software/vista_sata413.zip
Name Sonnet Tempo SATA Gen 2 PCI-X Adapter
Manufacturer Sonnet Technologies, Inc.
Hey Jaymz - do you know how to do this for the roustor version? I have one and am seeing the big drawbacks to the raid system built in, would just like to put windows on it.
Thanks.
I don’t think you’d have to do anything different. AFAIK, the roustor version just has a different board attached than the 2-port standard one.
If you find my network card drivers don’t work, then my favourite trick of identifying unknown hardware is this: You open up Device Manager, double click on the unknown device, and go to “Details”. Under the property “Device Instance ID” you’ll see a long string of crap.
There’s two numbers you need here - the first being the four digits following “VEN_”, which is your Vendor ID. The second is the four digits following “DEV_”, being your Device ID. You take these two and do a search at PCIDatabase.com, and it’ll let you know the real name of the device you’re searching for. It’s usually easier to search by “device” and then look for the vendor ID.
Hope this helps!
Thanks. Can you give a little more detail on your setup? That is, how are your disks arranged - in a raid? What size? Are you mixing brands of disks? Are you running the WHS of folder duplication, etc.
Ideally, if treating this system just like a windows machine, I would like to install the OS on one disk and then put in a raid 5 of the other 4 disks. Would that work? I ask just because the Thecus natively would never allow mixing of raid types with JBOD, etc.
Also I have heard bad things about the WHS folder duplication system of backing up.
Thanks for the tip on the drivers, too! I never thought of that!
Hmmm, so I got all the hardware bits with a working VGA, etc but when I install WHS, it says “Couldn’t initialize UI subsystem”. I googled that and looks like maybe slipstreaming in the sata drivers might help.
Well, I sort of give up on this - I got everything together, got it to start installing, but on the first reboot, it can’t find the sata drive. I tried changing the boot device in the bios to everything else (I think it should be scsi) but it just doesn’t see it. Any advice on that? I might just try to install windows 2003 on a flash or small IDE 44 pin drive and go from there, I think it will recognize that as a boot device.
Bob, check out this thread, appears you can only boot off IDE not SATA (unless the bios hack mentioned further up this page enables SATA boot)
http://thecususergroup.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=n5200modifications&action=display&thread=3318
Hey All,
Awesome article, thank you!
I have one of the very first Thecus N5200R with mobo version 1.1, when I enter the BIOS there is no option to enable WOL however according to ethtool in Debian the NIC does support WOL, can someone please offer some guidence as to wether is possible to update the BIOS to allow WOL?
Thanks in advance,
Adam
> sever
> windows
Can you spot the error?
Your post needs more neckbeard, atanok.
LUNIX LUNIX M$$$$$$$$$$
after upgrading bios as described my thecus 5200 Pro shows SUPERMICRO SATA Bios Version 1.0b and list all sata drives, I add in bios, booting from scsi device, but still it can`t boot from it. It hangs while Verifying DMI Pool Data
successfully installed debian lenny on thecus 5200 Pro
Hi all,
An update from me.
I have an 5200 (non pro,non router)
I have soldiered in the vga connector, although the one i had was too long so the rear of the case doesn’t fit correctly (will remove when happy so not an issue)
I have installed a 250gb 2.5inch ide drive - there are four holes in the top of the drive cage that allows a 2.5inch drive to be fixed! just take out the hot swop drives to get screw access.
I have install 1gb mem stick (see previous post)
I have installed Windows Server 2008 onto a 20gb partition on the 2.5inch drive which i boot from. I used a usb stick to do this (google install xxx from usb, where xxx is your os of choice)
I used the sata drivers above in a previous post by ‘Dave’ (Cheers bud) (no bios mods as i boot from IDE)
I’m just creating a RAID-5 volume in windows on my 5×400gb disks in the hot swop cage, currently ‘resyncing’ (will take a while)
I use Remote Desktop to remote admin server.
Happy so far - except:
Hardware issues:
Video drivers - Uses standard vga or the like but shows an issue - however it works
Target USB - Not required (used by Thecus to allow a pc to connect via USB and see Thecus as a usb HDD)
Other issues:
I seem to get occasional ‘ide0′ controller errors in the event log. Not sure why…
I want to test how reliable windows is when a disk is removed etc.. before i load my files…. Thecus OS was good if you accidental removed two disks - all was well when returned to normal.
Thanks all for your help to get me this far!
Hi all,
tomorrow I want try to install Windows Server 2008 on my Thecus 5200 Pro! I Upgraded the CPU to a 2 GHz version. Tomorrow I’ll get a IDE drive and a 1 Gig RAM Chip.
Is there any solution for the vga driver? Isn’t it a Intel driver?
I’ll report here when its done. ;)
Hi there,
This may actually be a stupid question. I have an idea that windows server will import the raid volume from linux. is that a possibility in this case?
I really like this project because my network performance on Gb with cat6 shielded cables and Gb switch was shocking… 4.11Mb/s MAX… insane. Hopefully this will be better. At least I know windows well.
@johner
Do you have any solution for the ide0 controller error?
Hi all,
Windows runs very well. My networkspeed is around 40 MB/s and is very stable.
I also have a solution for the ide0 bug. You have to disable the UDMA Mode in the BIOS.
Cant seem to make any USB keyboard work in BIOS or the boot sequence.. Any suggestions..??
Hi all,
Just a few notes from my own project.
Mine started when a firmware upgrade went wrong and killed my DOM. I recovered it in Linux, but while I had the box open, I started exploring. It’s now got a 2.5″ SATA drive to replace the DOM and is booting Windows Home Server with a RAID 5 storage area for my media.
So - on to the comments.
The VGA connector - Jaymz is right - it’s a bitch to get in, and if there’s any pressure from the monitor cable it pops out. You can tack-solder it at the two clips, but not the pins if you want to take it out again. Filing the slot on the back of the case to have a permanent VGA socket was very easy though, and makes maintenance a breeze.
The 20×2 LCD module - ymboc, it’s not a crystalfontz device. It’s made by SDEC in Taiwan. The model is LMC-S20201 and a data sheet is here
http://www.sdec.com.tw/downloadfiles/LMC-S20201.pdf
It looks as though it could be driven directly by parallel, but I’m yet to try.
Once you’ve installed the SuperMicro driver for the MV88SX6081, RAID 5 is possible under XP. The workings are all there, but the function has been removed. The good news is that it is simple to put back with a hex editor.
There’s an old guide on how to do this at
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windowsxp-make-raid-5-happen,925-2.html
It covers the files in Service pack 2 - but simple enought to modify for SP3 files. Alternatively, for SP3 there is a simple how-to, including edited downloadable files at
http://www.optimiz3.com/low-cost-and-reliable-network-attatched-software-jbod-raid-0-1-or-5/
Video is just an Intel 82854 GMCH adaptor, and it uses 32Mb of your RAM by default. You can modify the .inf file from the Intel 830M driver with the device ID used by the Thecus box - ie, change the line
%iMGM% = iMGM, PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3582
to
%iMGM% = iMGM, PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_358e
It seems to work in my limited testing (i did it last night) but I haven’t given it a good run yet. Don’t blame me if you try and it breaks - just reboot in VGA mode!
Finally - installing to the 2.5″ IDE drive from a bootable USB disk was made a whole lot easier using the program WinToFlash from Novicorp (wintoflash.com). It sets up your thum drive to boot and install Window, and has a very simple GUI.
Hope this helps someone. If anyone else has any luck with the LMC-S20201 display, pleas post!
Cheers,
Mullie