What a waste of about five hours.
I decided to take the 120Gb HDD out of my desktop PC and whack it into the FreeBSD server. I was using it to try out Linux again, but it annoys me since it still doesn’t work 100% and my interest in Linux has waned yet again.
Since Blake’s computer hasn’t been working for some time (I thought the Hard Drive in that was broken) I decided to ‘upgrade’ the server with bits out of Blake’s computer and get him another one when we have time and money.
Retrieving the server from behind my desk is a chore in itself. There’s no way to take it out sideways or underneath the table. You can only remove it by reaching right over the high desk and grabbing the top of the case and lifting it over the desk. Unfortunately, it’s in an old old full tower case which by itself is extremely heavy. Add the bits inside and try to lift it with nothing to pivot on by putting your arms over the top and trying to pull it up and you have yourself a perfect case for Occupational Health and Safety.
I got it out and pulled two hard drives out of it and put those with my 120Gb HDD into Blake’s smaller mini tower case. So that’s a 120Gb HDD, a 200Gb HDD and a 40Gb HDD which I was hoping to boot off. I was going to discard the 20Gb HDD I used to boot off.
To make sure it was all going to work, I plugged the PC into enough cables to boot it and show it starting FreeBSD on my monitor. Cheerin’. It wouldn’t even boot Blake’s OS nor let me install an OS on his HDD so his old 17Gb HDD must be broken, right?
I put it all together and leaned over the table and lifted the mini tower over it. My arms aren’t that long, so of course the PC drops the last foot to the floor (oops).
I power it up and it won’t start.
Apparently, it had been configured to have the main boot sector set up on the 20Gb HDD then load the kernel off the 40Gb HDD!! wtf!
After much stuffing around (and nearly calling Sarge in on the fone, but he wasn’t available) I managed to get it to boot the 20Gb HDD with an old kernel it still had on it. It booted most of the way but at the end it couldn’t get a signal any more from the HDD (controller?) and tried to reset the drive and locked up.
I put the old full tower together with the old motherboard already in it, in order to get a working PC for Blake with a nice 40Gb HDD in it.
I put in my Windows XP cd and it loaded all the drivers into memory and displayed “Booting Windows…”. After 30 seconds it shut down the HDD and after another 30 seconds it shut the PC off. I tried another XP cd but it did the same thing, so I chucked in my Knoppix Live CD and it started up, detected some hardware, sent TERM signals to all processes and turned the PC off again.
*SIIIIIIIIIIIGH*
I found another old motherboard in the cupboard which had stopped working ages ago and had been replaced, but I thought “what they hey” and put it into the mini tower case instaed. That wouldn’t boot up either, so it MUST be dead.
By this time I was very frustrated and angry. A lot of time invested and both motherboards are broken.
I had some lunch and a shower and went back to business.
I reached over and picked up that mini tower case, nearly giving myself another hernia, and pulled all it’s guts out again and put them all back into the full tower.
Next, I leaned over the table again and heaved the damn full tower up and over again. It only has to drop about half a foot to the ground.
I had decided to put both the 40Gb and 20Gb HDD’s back into the full tower since they seem so reliant on each other and detatched the CD Burner drive in there. So now it’s got: 200Gb HDD, 120Gb HDD, 40Gb HDD and 20Gb HDD in there. 380Gb should be enough for anyone 
So, now I have a server which works, but it’s a 433 MHz Celeron with 256Mb RAM. It was going to be an Athlon XP 1600+ with 512Mb RAM and cables and controller supporting 100 UDMA drives instead of the 33 it now supports. At least it supports S.M.A.R.T mode (Never knew what that was but I suspect it’s not as good as having 100 UDMA mode HDDs in there. For some reason, the motherboard which supports UDMA 100 automatically disabled S.M.A.R.T on the HDD’s anyway. Weird.
Oh well. I will have to get a new motherboard for the server at some stage. I’m sure I can get a relatively cheap one. So long as it supports Athlon 1600+ (do they have them any more? I might have to go to the computer markets and get a second hand mobo).
So, maybe Blake’s 17Gb HDD does work after all and it was the motherboard controller that was broken? Dunno. Maybe both.
We’ve seen advertisements on TV about ex-Government laptops for a couple of hundred dollars, so we might get Blake one of those instead.
I also chucked in an old Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 sound card I found in a drawer in the bedroom. If/when I cbf I might install sound drivers on my FreeBSD servers, but now I’m off to play Second Life again. I need the relaxation.
