Paul Henman at henman.ca

I haven’t posted very much this month, partly because of an aborted attempt at starting work (which means I’m back looking for a project management gig again) and then I had not one but two hard drives die on me!

One of them was my main boot drive (Windows XP / Fedora Linux dual boot) which was backed up pretty often, so I didn’t lose much data but it’s taking forever to reinstall/configure everything back to how I like it. (Unfortunately you can’t simply restore Windows applications or some programs config settings.)

The other drive was a 500Gb backup drive, containing all of my photos! Read more »

When I bought a new motherboard for my PC (an ASUS P5Q), I didn’t realise it only had one IDE connector. That’s OK for the DVD burner and the hard drive caddy (which I’ve used for some years to simplify dual booting: one hard drive for Windows and one for Linux) but I’ve got a few more IDE drives that I’d like to hook up too.

Fortunately I found some cheap IDE-SATA converter cards, which meant I could connect my other IDE drives to the SATA ports … once I beat the converters into submission! They are simply a small breadboard with an IDE connector on one side and SATA power+data ports on the other. There’s also a switch and jumper which have to be set in conjunction, so there’s really only two possible settings. Somehow it took a few days and a lot of frustration before it decided to play nicely – I have no idea why it suddenly decided to work, but I’m glad it did and I’m very careful not to upset it. (Note: if you have one of these converters, remember you have to plug in the IDE power as well as the SATA power.)

Yesterday I used HD Clone to copy my Windows XP installation from a 40GB IDE drive to the main 500Gb SATA drive. It took a couple of hours but was completely painless. I removed the IDE drive (from the caddy) and booted in to XP with no problems.

Today I thought I’d install Fedora as a second operating system (dual boot) on the 500Gb SATA drive. I installed Fedora 10 Beta a few days ago (on a spare IDE drive) and it worked fine, but I thought it would be safer to use the stable Fedora 9 for my secondary o/s. (You can tell it’s not going to end well, can’t you?) The install went fine; it knew XP was already installed and so it set up the dual boot selection. I removed the install DVD, rebooted, and told it to start Linux … which it did, but then all I got was an error message from the monitor saying it couldn’t display the image! I’ve tried auto-adjust and manually changing the monitor’s settings; I’ve tried getting to just a command line login prompt (in case it’s an X config problem) but nothing’s working.

It’s not the end of the world; it’s certainly not top of my To Do list (finding a job is!) and I might just wait for Fedora 10 to be released because I’ve read it has some nifty new hardware support including AHCI. (I would go to 10 Beta now but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to upgrade it or if it’ll have to be reinstalled once 10 is fully released.) If I absolutely have to use Linux, I’ve still got the Fedora 10 Beta install (in a disk caddy) so I could just slot it in.

One thing I still have to deal with is sending a dead 250Gb SATA drive back to Maxtor … before the warranty expires would be a good idea!

The Rogers engineer arrived at lunchtime, told me it was the UPS that was causing the problem, removed the cable and left. (I had the cable routed via the UPS to filter out any spikes, but it’s Rogers’ modem so I’m OK with it being fried if that’s what they want.)

The connection was stable for about 90mins (same as it had been most of the morning) but the modem reset itself again a couple of minutes ago. If it’s not the signal, then (presumably) it must be a problem with the modem itself – they can’t be very expensive, so surely the next step is to replace the modem?

I don’t know what’s wrong but my internet connection has dropped five times this evening, each time for at least a couple of minutes. Ah, there it goes again – make that six times.

Guess I’ll have to try to get Rogers’ hopeless “voice recognition” interface to recognise that I need internet technical support – I still don’t understand why they don’t allow key entry too. … … Well, I finally got past that hurdle and was only on hold about 3 minutes.

Apparently there are no reported problems in my area, so I tried another hard reset (pull the power) but that doesn’t fix it, oddly enough.

A technician will visit “between 8am and 5pm tomorrow”. Guess I’ll be here, twiddling my thumbs. Oh, I guess that means I get to work on the huge backlog of photos without any distraction. Yay, I think.

I decided I should drain the remaining coolant out of my old server today, in case I’m going to rebuild it and also to prevent any further leaks (not that there was much fluid left). It’s not many people who can say they have to disassemble their PC in a sink!

Still, at least I now know why the server wouldn’t start up back in September: (Click on image for larger versions)

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