Data Center Technician Interview Questions & Answers

Question 1. What Are All The Components In A Pc Or Server?

Answer :

PC: chassi, system board, psu, cpu, ram, hdd, fans, cables, graphics card, dvd, monitor, keyboard/mouse

Server: same with deduction of a extra graphics card (is one on the system board), and addition of hdd controller, possibly backplane, no cd/dvd, extra nic, double cpu, ram, psu, fans, remote monitoring/console.

Question 2. What Protocol Is Used By Ping?

Answer :

ICMP (this is a sneaky question – an obvious fault is to go for TCP or UDP)

Question 3. How Many Ide Devices Can You Have In A Pc?

Answer :

two per channel (usually 4)

Question 4. How Many Can You Have On Each Channel? What Are They Called?

Answer :

2 / master and slave

Question 5. What Is The Resolution In Windows 2000 Safe Mode?

Answer :

800×600 or 640×480?- see this link on mydigitallife or this post on tom’s hardware.

Question 6. What Is The Name Of The Ethernet Plug?

Answer :

RJ45

Question 7. How Do You Recognize A Broken Hard Drive Without Software Or Removing It From The Machine?

Answer :

1. Noise (tick tack sound of the arm getting stuck/hitting something)
2. Any leds on the disk, system board, controller
3. Any vibration or anything from the disk?

Question 8. How Do You Find The First Disk In A Linux Os?

Answer :

Look under /dev/ for a disk like /dev/sda(SATA) /dev/hda (PATA). Then /dev/sda1 is the first partition.

Question 9. Name Two Devices Needed To Make A Network?

Answer :

switch and router (well, network card (NIC) and router should do it, or a switch and network card.. depends how big you want to make it, really i guess you can have a network with a crossover cable and two nics).

Question 10. What Is Bios?

Answer :

Basic input/output system. Responsible for initializing hardware, POST/startup diagnostics, boot the OS and varies hardware settings.

Question 11. What Is The Bit Rate Of A Serial Interface Of A Network Device?

Answer :

the default apparently in hyperterminal – 9600 (this might be tricky, in my experience this varies between the devices – max is probably 115200bps). Maybe what they are asking for is what is the default speed of a Cisco switch’s aux or console port? If so, the answer is 9600.

Question 12. What Is The Port Used For Http?

Answer :

80

Question 13. What Is The Difference Between Pcie And Pci?

Answer :

PCI-e is newer than PCI and PCI-x. The slots look different and they are not compatible.

Question 14. How Many Primary Partitions Can You Have In Dos?

Answer :

Four primary and maximum one active per disk. See this link for some explanations. Unsure at this stage what the exact question was.

Question 15. What Does Http Stand For?

Answer :

 Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

Question 16. What Is Rom?

Answer :

Read Only Memory – Used for storing data that you do not want somebody to write to.

Question 17. Length Of Cat5 Transmission?

Answer :

100m.