on breaking computers

Thursday, October 18, 2001, at 06:15PM

By Eric Richardson

So today I decide I really need to take the IDE drive out of my computer. I have three drives, I'm not really doing much with the IDE drive, no problem. Except that that's my boot drive, and I've never tried booting SCSI on this machine. Of course, I push on. Fun ensues. Click for more.

My computer is now one of the most jumbled collection of parts ever assembled. The hard drive that I just took out was one of three original pieces. Now only the CD-ROM and soundcard remain, and the CD-ROM comes closer to dying every day.

To spare a really long and ugly story, I ended up wiping out one of my SCSI drives, hosing LILO, having to find a rescue CD, booting the rescue CD, repartitioning the hosed SCSI drive, fighting LILO version problems, wiping out the MBR, repartitioning, copying on a new kernel, and restarting. Magically, it all works.

I also decided to splice another fan into the power for the one I've got on my power supply. This is the power supply that's still outside of my computer, remember.

Now I need to move my second drive from one side of a 5.25" bay to the actual hard drive bays, but I don't want to press my luck on doing things while the machine's running.

Ahhhh... Fun, fun, fun. And something tells me I'll be doing more of this over the next days as I fight my old server in San Fransisco.