Sunday, April 20, 2008

Hardware that died this week (or nearly)

Have been having various hardware issues this week
1) Laptop was getting very slow, found out the dvd drive was not working anymore but luckily enough discovered that there was a partition with a clean image, only by accident I discovered that there was a simple way of restoring that image while booting, backed up everything important. Pressed F9 during boot, 20 minutes later had a clean Windows XP, now installed with MUCH less software, nice and fast again, and plenty of disk space.

2) Also looked at my old old epia mini itx motherboard, would not boot: first casualty: power supply, luckily I had a spare 150 watt one, up and running again.

3) Looked at a pc that I used as storage for a while, started it up, second casualty another power supply. Decided to mount the disks on my main linux machine,through some nifty hardware device, a USB thingy that lets you attach any hard disk (SATA/IDE) quickly. One disk was completely unreadable (could have been used with LVM) but this one only had a backup of my mp3 collection, the other one could be read and found some important files back.

The other disk is now added to the Epia motherboard. I installed freenas on a 128Mb Compact Flash card, for which I had a converter to be able to attach it to an IDE interface so it is used as a harddisk, freenas runs happily from it, although it takes 3 minutes to boot.

I plugged in a SATA card so the 2 SATA disks can be used again and I can have a good backup of my music and other important files.

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