el rinconcito

For quite awhile now this machine has been acting strangely (posts here and here), then suddenly everything is OK again.

The problem was that the hard drive kept showing errors, or the swap wouldn't mount, or the main partition wouldn't mount. I ran an fsck manually one time after the system went down, and it fixed a lot of errors, then the system went down again. I'm not that much of a geek about these things, so I have to guess at what to do as best I can.

I kept checking the IDE drive connections and even replaced the cable one time. Same problem.

I wanted to drop in a new SATA hard drive to see if the old IDE drive was what was giving problems, but I had to flash the BIOS to get it to work. This machine is about five years old, I think, and probably SATA's weren't around that much back then.

Anyway, once I flashed the BIOS, all is OK again. I didn't even install the new drive. Why would the BIOS make any difference? It's the same firmware that has worked correctly for years. I'll cross my fingers. All is running well for three days now, but probably it will go down again after this post.

All this reminds me of an English car I had many years ago. I would replace the brakes only to find out that some wiring went bad afterwards. I'd repack a wheel bearing and then the muffler would fall off. That car was the master of strange unrelated problems. The computer seems to be acting the same.

My computer locked up again with hard drive errors (some prior posts). In the process of working out a solution, I ran into so many roadblocks it was crazy. Here's part of the sad tale.

My main hard drive is a 320GB IDE drive. I want to install a 750GB SATA drive, install Ubuntu to that, then just copy my home directory over to the larger drive. Even though the 320GB IDE drive is giving errors, I can read it from a CD boot of Linux, so the files seem safe.

Soooo, I install the SATA drive and discover that the BIOS hangs. Reading the Asus webpages about this old motherboard, I discover that a BIOS update will fix that, but this update must take place using a 3.5 inch floppy, but the floppy drive is in the non-booting computer, so I can't get online with the floppy-capable machine to write a file to a floppy. *sigh* Booting the ailing machine with a Linux CD results in all kinds of crazy problems trying to mount and write a msdos floppy. I'm starting to get madly frustrated at this point.

Now, let's select another machine that has a floppy drive and try to move on. More hell follows.

My attic is full of old computers that people have given me over the years, and they all have floppy drives, but I discover that only one machine also has an ethernet card. All the others just have dialup modems. I take the machine into another room where I have an ethernet connection, but my house is old, and the power outlet in there is the 2-prong type, and the computer power cords are all 3-prong. I can't find an adapter. This is crazy. I finally stretch the cords to a 3-prong outlet behind a heavy dresser and I boot the one ethernet capable machine and discover that it has WindowsME on it. Oh, that's nasty.

I then find out the WindowsME machine blue screens every time I try to unzip the needed update file, so I try to download the file again to Brian's Linux laptop, but then the Asus file server falls over dead. *DAMN!* After finally getting the file on the laptop (which has no floppy drive), I get it unzipped and e-mail the frigging .bin file over to the WindowsME machine so I can fetch it in with just a web browser and write it to the floppy before ME bluescreens again. Meanwhile, I am searching the house from top to bottom trying to find a damned 3.5 inch diskette. I finally found one in the bottom of a closet. This is getting to be WAAAYYY too much trouble.

I finally get the file written to the floppy and walk it over to the original ailing computer so I can start it up while holding down ALT+F2 to start the AWARDFLASH update utility. I then get an error message that I am using a file for the version 1 motherboard, and I have the version 2. I then have to repeat the steps above, AGAIN, while fighting the WindowsME blue screens.

I finally get the mo-phuck BIOS updated so I can now choose to boot from a SATA drive. Now I just have to hook the SATA drive back up and see what other weirdness awaits me.

Suddenly the original IDE drive is no longer giving errors.

Thinking of all the stuff above, the roadblock of a 2-prong versus 3-prong power outlet brought me the closest to bursting into tears.

Now I'm still not sure that the 320GB IDE drive is really bad. Is it memory? Before I plunk down $50 on more memory, I want to exhaust all the hard drive options.

It's tempting to just buy a new machine, but the 850 dollars for the one I want would screw my budget through probably February, and it would take may favorite computer store 4 days to get it ready anyway. I'd hate to retire an old machine just because of some silly error. I might as well work with this one some more and learn some stuff.

I better just take a break and go outside.

I think my hard drive is failing, but what do I know about these things. Three times in the past twelve hours I've found my computer all locked up, or everything seg faulting, or a kernel panic.

I switched over to a console as it was going down one time, I typed "df", and it said something about ext3 fs errors on /dev/hda1. That's the master drive. Oh, master!

Should I just assume it's the hard drive? Dunno. I could pick up a new one tomorrow, but I hate to part with $80 right now.

Strangely, I've never had a hard drive just up and fail since 1996. I've always sworn by Western Digitals. I've made my backups.

In other news today, I bathed the dog and wished my sweet BF a happy 20th anniversary.