Today was one of those very frustrating days dealing with hardware. I hate dealing with hardware.
Radinfo’s been without a backup solution for the last few months now ever since the DLT drive I was using went belly up. I was planning to use an LTO drive I scavenged to do the tape-to-tape transfer project on the new machine. For some reason it wasn’t cooperating though and just sat there flashing it’s LEDs at me. Futzed around with it for a couple of hours getting nowhere before I decided to call it a day.
Welcome to radinfo v3!
The new radinfo server is now up and running, and should be considerably faster than the old one. I think everything should work, but if anybody happens to notice any breakage, just drop me a line.
User to BIOS: Where’s the drive?
The new laptop drive arrived today from Newegg, a Western Digital Scorpio 120GB drive. Should have been an easy replacement. Pop the old drive out, remove from the bracket and pop the new one in, re-attach the blade adapter and stick it back into the laptop.
Wrong. sigh.
Put the new drive in, power it up and go to the BIOS screen to make sure the drive is identified, but for some reason the BIOS reports no primary hard drive.
So now the question is: Do I have a bad drive, or is the adapter/motherboard pooched?
Fortunately the laptop I use at work is the same model, so I’ll just head in to work, grab it and bring it home so I can try the new drive out in it. If the drive works there, then that points to the laptop. If it doesn’t work, then it’s a call to Newegg to see about an exchange.
radinfo v3 almost ready
Just about ready to bring the new server online. I think I’ve got all the data migrated over and as far as I can see everything seems to be operating properly. Some last minute testing to do and then Monday I should be able to swap the servers. The new box definitely performs much better than the existing server so I’m looking forward to getting it running.
Dead hard drive
The hard drive in the wife’s laptop up and died on us tonight. Just like that. It was working fine a few hours ago and then I put it in hibernate mode. She went to turn it back on and got nothing but a BSOD. The drive was making those characteristic clicking and whirring sounds of a dead hard drive, so it sounds like it’s time for a new one. Sadly, the last back up was from a few months ago just before Christmas, so there’s going to be some data loss.
Laptop drives are surprisingly cheap. Over at Newegg a 160GB drive can be had for $120. Surprising just how small these things are.