The hard drive in my father’s computer finally died. It was a 74GB Raptor which was originally mine. He wanted to get his computer running as fast as possible, so I hopped on Newegg and ordered a 320GB drive for him.
For kicks, I decided to see if the drive was still under warranty. To my surprise it was! The drive was about 4 years old. I went through the RMA process and just got a replacement a few days ago.
I figured I would use the drive for my / (root), /home, and swap partitions.
However, on my 2x 750GB HDs I had three raid arrays. One for /boot, / (root), and /home. I wanted to make the /home raid array into /data, but I no longer needed /boot or / (root).
Therefore I need to remove the two unneeded raid arrays and expand the last one, /home.
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Well I was not excepting this to come. Let me explain. First my mother’s laptop died, sort of. It would be on AC power and then suddenly switch over to battery power. Because the battery no longer held a long charge ( <5 min), this became problematic. I decided it was best to give my mom my Dell Vostro 1000 laptop and just buy some cheap stuff from newegg. As you may or may not know my desktop at the time was an Atom 1.6ghz. This was enough for normal everyday tasks, but not enough for the occasional Virtual Machine or movie conversion.
$150 for a motherboard, cpu, and a stick of ram sure in the hell beats $400 for a mediocre laptop. I ordered the parts, but later that night I found out that the sata card on my server stopped working. This meant no more Hard Drives! Needless to say this caused the Linux to crash and it was impossible to bootup again.
So Linux saved the day… It was about 11:00pm and I was getting ready to go to bed. This was when I found out my server’s sata card just died. So I took my Atom desktop, took out the hard drive, and tossed the server’s drive in there. Then with a little bit of file editing (fstab, grub, and inintrd boot image) I had the system back up and running. So in three hours I had the whole server back online with all its services going. Now lets see that happen with Windows.
Finally, the motherboard, stick of ram, and cpu arrived. To make a long story short, I installed everything into the case that was housing, the now broken, server. Everything was going fine and I installed Arch Linux. I went to run firefox, but had no luck. I was receiving a “Bus Error”. After a quick google and some time on IRC I determined there was a corrupt library installed. Instead of trying to figure out what lib was corrupt I figured it was just easier to reinstall as I didn’t have much setup.
I reinstalled and now everything is working without a hitch. Now for the part you’ve all been waiting for, the specs!
The PSU and case are 4-5 years old, but, hey, they work. Overall this is a pretty nice system. It has more than enough power for what I need it to do. My only complaint with the motherboard is that suspend-2-ram is total trash in Linux. The onboard nvidia graphics are pretty nice too. I can play UT2004 which makes me happy!
I need to replace the power supply as it is very loud! I will probably do this before I go of to college as I doubt my roomate wants to listen to a blaring fan all night long!
Well believe it or not I am still kicking and screaming! I finished one College class and I have one left to go. I just have a few more small sections of questions to answer.
I dropped learning dvorak, and learned qwerty again. I found out that one of the placement tests at The University of Akron gives a time typing test. I will be taking these tests on Monday so hopefully I’ll be able to switch back to dvorak without much of a problem afterward.
My uncle decided to get a new computer. So I ordered the parts and put it all together. Everything seemed fine. However, when ever installing software the system would freeze and lock up. The BIOS would not detect the drive until I powered off and powered the machine back on. When this happened I grabbed the sata cable and plugged it into my system. My system detected the drive and everything seemed to be okay. This lead me to conclude it was the motherboard that was bad, maybe faulty sata controller. Well I RMA’d the board and got a new one yesterday. Hooked everything up and I thought the problem was solved. Needless to say it was not and the same behavior started occur, however the BIOS still detects the drive when the freeze/lock-up happens. So I got an RMA for the hard drive and we will see what happens. I put and older IDE drive in the system and everything seems to work just fine so I don’t think it is any of the other components causing problems.
I was suppose to take the Red Hat Certified Technician exam on June 12th. Well the person that my professor had to talk in order to get the vouchers, waited to long and the exam center filled up. They are offering us July 24th which I suppose will work. It is just a pain because everything is going to start picking up by that time. What can you do though?
Well until next time…. I’m out!
Well today kinda sucks, I found out my speaker system is dead! The subwoofer decided to take a crap on me. For whatever reason the left audio RCA port stopped working. The audio was barely audible out of the left speaker. However the same speaker works fine when plugged into the right RCA port.
Sadly my computer doesn’t provide enough power to the two satellite speakers so I can only use my mp3 player to listen to music. I guess it is better than nothing though.
I don’t exactly have the money to buy a new pair of speakers right now.
I’m looking at either:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16836113008 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16836113168 right now.
I am hoping the become a bit cheaper though, maybe I can find them on sale.
For the time being I’ll be speakerless, as I don’t even have a pair of cheap speakers laying around.
Well I upgraded my laptop to kernel 2.6.26 and when I rebooted I got some errors about memory not being able to be allocated. So I decided to trouble shoot and see if I had bad ram. After I got done I went to put both sticks of ram back in and the laptop wouldn’t boot. After some investigation I found out whenever I had ram in the second dimm the laptop’s caps lock key would blink and I would get no display.
I contacted Dell via the chat interface and they told me they’d send me a shipping box. Well I got the box yesterday and shipped the laptop yesterday.
Dell claims that it is a faulty motherboard which sounds right. The rep I spoke to said I should have it back before August 20th! This means that I should have it back before school starts. I am curious to see if they spend the time to replace the motherboard or if they send me a brand new unit.