Sunday, December 02

Geek

Joy

I've been playing with VMWare, as I mentioned before, and it's a memory-hungry beastie, so I decided to take 1GB of memory out of my Linux box (which didn't really need it) and add it to my Windows box, to bring it up to 3GB.

In the process, I seem to have destroyed the Linux box* - right now, it won't even bring up a BIOS screen, though it was working last night - and the DVI port on my monitor.

So, about average.

Update: I've got the BIOS screen back.  It correctly identifies all the drives, but won't boot.  It will start to boot from a Fedora 8 Live CD, before dying of a BIOS error.  I'll experiment further later.

Update: Memory error?  I'll test that...

Update: I've underclocked the CPU just in case, and fired up Memtest86.  I'll leave that to soak for a few hours and see what comes up.

Update: Memtest86 showed no problems, but another attempt to boot into the Live CD gave me a machine check exception indicating that memory bank 4 (i.e. module 2) was faulty.  I removed that, and I no longer get a machine check exception.

Of course, it still doesn't boot...

Update: Not memory.  That would be too easy.  Different modules in different sockets produce the same error, which makes it the CPU or the motherboard.  Both of which are out of warranty and out of production, of course.

So, what are my chances of migrating two software RAID arrays to another Linux box and recovering the data?

Update: Coaxed it into booting off a Knoppix CD.  One of the disks seems to be dead, and Knoppix didn't recognise an of the RAID volumes.  What I really need is a Fedora Core 4 x64 Rescue CD.  Anyone got one of those?

Update: You never know what you'll find until you look.  Let's see if it helps.

Update: Oh, I do have about 260 DVD-Rs worth of backups.  And a lot of stuff that was already copied onto other computers.  And looking at this content list I made a while back, there was a whole lot of crap on there.  It's still not exactly happy-making.

Update: The rescue CD gives me a screen full of stack traces, even when I disable the drive that was causing problems with Knoppix.  Bleh.  Bleh, I say!

* The one with about 1.2TB of anime on it.  That one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:49 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 You didn't need all that anime anyway.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, December 02 2007 02:13 PM (+rSRq)

2 Hardware seems to have become increasingly flakey of late.

My sneaky suspicion is that with every decreasing release cycles (now currently in nanoseconds before prices drop), the quality control has suffered a little.

Some DDR RAM I bought turned out to be flakey. After three months I found the receipt. In that time DDR RAM has become scarce as hens teeth.

Posted by: Andrew at Tuesday, December 04 2007 09:15 AM (/uGTr)

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