| 1 |
Well, there's a tale and no mistake. |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
Early December, it was, when I started getting refusal to boot. Even the |
| 4 |
POST wouldn't run until I took out half the RAM. Then, while switching |
| 5 |
sticks about to find where the problem was, in my clumsiness I managed to |
| 6 |
break one of the DIMM slots. Looked like I had to change the motherboard, |
| 7 |
but I wanted advice from the system builder, Armari, so I packed the box up |
| 8 |
and sent it off. The news was not good, so as the system was three years |
| 9 |
old by then, I decided to cut my losses and have the motherboard replaced. |
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
Oh, and by the way, said Darryll, did I know that one of my SATA disks was |
| 12 |
about to fail? I didn't, no. Just disconnect it, I said, and I'll see what |
| 13 |
I can get off it when it comes home. Eight months old - I ask you! |
| 14 |
|
| 15 |
The box came back on the 23rd after quite a wait for SuperMicro to get a |
| 16 |
board out to Armari. I spent spare time over Christmas trying to get a |
| 17 |
system working, and I started an mdraid thread here on 28 December. Thanks |
| 18 |
for the suggestions, those who tried to help. |
| 19 |
|
| 20 |
Problems continued to haunt me. I couldn't boot a floppy with Smart Boot |
| 21 |
Manager on it, nor any other for that matter; I couldn't find a way to |
| 22 |
mount the newly rebuilt md partitions other than from the installation |
| 23 |
disk; and I kept getting mysterious oddities all over the place. |
| 24 |
|
| 25 |
Eventually the penny dropped, and I disconnected the allegedly imminently |
| 26 |
failing SATA disk. I'd already disabled it in the BIOS, but that left the |
| 27 |
electrical connections in place, of course, and I've a nasty feeling that |
| 28 |
stray pulses were getting out of the disk and into places they shouldn't. So |
| 29 |
I pulled both plugs: power and signal, since when the system has seemed |
| 30 |
more stable. |
| 31 |
|
| 32 |
So, one disk down and no RAID. No problem - just delete the type-fd |
| 33 |
partitions off the remaining disk, create new Reiser file-systems and |
| 34 |
restore the backup; then worry about what to do about the possibility of |
| 35 |
the disk failure's having damaged the configuration. Well, as we all build |
| 36 |
from source hereabouts, and the source files are protected with checksums, |
| 37 |
all I had to do, I reasoned, was to emerge -e system and then world. |
| 38 |
|
| 39 |
Heigh-ho. After going through etc-update carefully and making sure I hadn't |
| 40 |
thrown out any of my settings, I now find a few little quirks. I really |
| 41 |
don't want to have install again from scratch, as distinct from recovering |
| 42 |
backups (my wife is patient - of course - but I'm sure she doesn't quite |
| 43 |
understand how running a computer can possibly take up so much time), but I |
| 44 |
can't be confident in the system as it is. Kdm won't start, vmware-server |
| 45 |
locks the machine solid, and one or two other things aren't quite right, |
| 46 |
such as Smart Boot Manager not booting. To cap it all, today both the |
| 47 |
on-board Ethernet ports stopped working and I had to slot in a spare PCI |
| 48 |
card. |
| 49 |
|
| 50 |
We do do all this sort of thing for fun, don't we? |
| 51 |
|
| 52 |
-- |
| 53 |
Rgds |
| 54 |
Peter |
| 55 |
-- |
| 56 |
gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list |
Archives