WTF happened Friday. The WinXP box died, cause unknown. The big Win2K file server that’s under construction has a wonky driver controller and can’t perform it’s duties. Christopher’s wireless router is acting weird and won’t let his TiVo connect. One of the spare parts boxes I discovered while cleaning has a worthless motherboard. One of the few remaining AGP cards I discovered is dead. I can’t seem to find any DDR memory.
Most of these things existed already, but it all decided to act up on the same day.
The XP box has been a little iffy on bootup sometimes. It finally died with an old fashioned “NTLDR is missing” error. This could be the drive or motherboard. Either way, it’s toast and I get to rebuild it. Somebody’s going to get introduced to a hammer.
The drive is a 1st gen 10K 36 gig Raptor from 4 years ago. It has been THE c: drive in every computer since then. That’s pretty close to 24/7 for 4 years. So, maybe it’s time.
The motherboard onboard network controller died a few weeks ago and I had to dig up a card. This happens so frequently that I buy network cards in 5 packs. The onboard NIC always dies. I found it very interesting that a 10 yr old 3Com card is significantly fast that a new Via Rhine Etherfast 2 onboard. Name brand counts.
The rebuilt box will will use a RAID-0 to duplicate the contents on 250 gig. Enough of this. There’s still the problem of the RAID driver. You have to put in on a floppy disk. Who uses floppy drives? I have 2 or 3, but I wouldn’t trust any of the floppies. Floppies. Seriously.
I have spent a considerable amount of time building a Win2K Adv Server on a low power Via motherboard. Theres only one expansion slot. This depends a lot upon all the onboard components working. The Event Log shows drive controller errors. This might be ok for a regular computer, but not a dedicated file server.
Fortunately, I was able to drop the hard drive into another box that only uses DDR memory. That’s when I discovered that I have very little of it. I found 1 stick. Win2K came up after a while. Sometimes the installed drivers don’t match the new motherboard and lock up before you can do anything about it.
This thing uses 3 times the electricity before doing any work. The case, it’s actually in a case, is not going to hold all the hard drives. There are plenty of PCI slots and it uses AGP. The chip is an old Sempron 2500.
I’m trying to consolidate the hard drives so I can reuse them on the XP box that has to be rebuilt. To do that I need to copy the contents off on and onto another. Except Win2K doesn’t handle really large files, 8 gig. This is stunning for a high end server OS. Something about built-in CopyFile and CopyFileEx caching file bits. This might be good for small things, but causes a problem for very, very large things. Where copying should take 2-3 hours, it will take 1-2 wks. It’s faster to copy out to another computer over the network and back in, than to copy one disk to another.
Christopher was trying to connect his TiVo to the network this morning and called. We worked out several things, but didn’t get it working. For some reason, the wireless side of his ATT router isn’t using DHCP. Configuring manually is complicated. There are lots of possible addresses to try. He’s tried the TiVo Wireless adapter and the phone line. The phone should always work and yet it doesn’t. Lots of internet searches haven’t revealed much.
There’s plenty of tech crap in the outbox and it seems I have yet another partial desktop computer.
Update (1/7/2008):
Last night I tried to copy from one disk to another. Even though it was slow, maybe I could work something out. The source hard drive was dead this morning.