Computer Heck
Jul. 8th, 2005 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkagesIt all started when my ISP, my buddy Steve, got hit with an enormous power surge. Now it must be understood that the reason I have hosted my erstwhile blog with Steve is that it is 100% free. This means, however, that certain amenities, such as peering, UPSs, and backups, have not been forthcoming. Hence, the surge reduced his equipment room (I cannot bring myself to call it a "data center") to a pile of smoldering, non-recoverable garbage. Nelliphant is history. (It exists as an sqldump from three months ago, but I'm not sure I want to put it back up on Steve's equipment.)
Suddenly, I got religion about backups. My tape drive had never gotten along with my SCSI card, and I had given up ever getting a coherent backup a while back. Now, I rushed out to Fry's, bought a DVD +/- RW drive, and installed it promptly. I had made one fatal error, though. I bought the $60.00 Fry's special. Never do that. The drive ruined the entente among my five-year-old computer's components, which had, up until this point, agreed to quietly work together. Now, things started crashing... like the backup. I pulled the DVD drive, but the damage had been done.
There is an intersecting series of events. Once I had gotten the DVD drive, I had wanted to try it out by burning Debian DVDs. I had successfully downloaded the images in 12 hours, burned them, and installed Debian. Coming from RedHat, there was a lot I had to learn, and it wasn't too long before I f***** the X server. (I'm lucky I didn't damage my monitor, my graphics card, or both.) So, I decided, let's wipe out Debian altogether. I formatted my third drive, home to Linux, with NTFS. As a consequence, I ran into a wee bit of trouble with the bootloader, grub, which desired a splash screen from the third drive It hung with an error immediately on boot.
At this point, one might say, "Why not break out the Windows Recovery Console and restore your MBR with fixmbr?" The answer is that my computer, for reasons only known to it, would not boot from any Windows CD; instead, it stopped dead at the grub error. Oddly enough, it liked Linux install CDs just fine. So I tried to install Fedora 3 from CD-ROM. It was now that the instability caused by the Fry's DVD drive came into play; though long gone, it exerted its malefic influence throughout the next few days. Every time I tried to install any Linux distribution, it would hang and die midway through. It got to the point where I'd done it so many times that I could predict the sequence of RPMs or .debs as they were written to disk. Then, I remembered a Knoppix CD I had lying around. Let's give one for the Knopper, because I actually got to a shell prompt. Now, I thought, I could just run lilo and solve everything. Unfortunately, knoppix aliases its drives in such a way that I couldn't mount my first drive read/write. Not that this would have happened anyway, because there's no driver that could possibly mount an NTFS volume read/write. (Well, maybe in Redmond, where they may be working on the first "shared source" distribution of Linux. :-() The machine crashed and rebooted every twenty minutes, giving me only so much time to think. I did have one truly imaginative moment, when I tried running the Windows installer under Wine. It worked for about two screens.
What finally broke the logjam was knoppix-install, which installs the CD-ROM to the hard disk. Although there were enough read errors to render Linux useless, it did get a working boot sector onto my computer. Now, I could load the recovery console, and my problem was fixed with fixboot and fixmbr.
So now, I have a working computer -- for some value of working. I completed one successful disaster recovery backup, but I'm not sure if it was just luck that the machine didn't hang.
I am now in the market for an unaffordable new or used computer, about two years ahead of schedule. How about a used IBM Z-station?
Lessons I should learn from this:
(1) TANSTAAFL.
(2) No Fry's specials.
(3) Never give up.
(4) Never seek employment as a system administrator. (No worries here.)
Suddenly, I got religion about backups. My tape drive had never gotten along with my SCSI card, and I had given up ever getting a coherent backup a while back. Now, I rushed out to Fry's, bought a DVD +/- RW drive, and installed it promptly. I had made one fatal error, though. I bought the $60.00 Fry's special. Never do that. The drive ruined the entente among my five-year-old computer's components, which had, up until this point, agreed to quietly work together. Now, things started crashing... like the backup. I pulled the DVD drive, but the damage had been done.
There is an intersecting series of events. Once I had gotten the DVD drive, I had wanted to try it out by burning Debian DVDs. I had successfully downloaded the images in 12 hours, burned them, and installed Debian. Coming from RedHat, there was a lot I had to learn, and it wasn't too long before I f***** the X server. (I'm lucky I didn't damage my monitor, my graphics card, or both.) So, I decided, let's wipe out Debian altogether. I formatted my third drive, home to Linux, with NTFS. As a consequence, I ran into a wee bit of trouble with the bootloader, grub, which desired a splash screen from the third drive It hung with an error immediately on boot.
At this point, one might say, "Why not break out the Windows Recovery Console and restore your MBR with fixmbr?" The answer is that my computer, for reasons only known to it, would not boot from any Windows CD; instead, it stopped dead at the grub error. Oddly enough, it liked Linux install CDs just fine. So I tried to install Fedora 3 from CD-ROM. It was now that the instability caused by the Fry's DVD drive came into play; though long gone, it exerted its malefic influence throughout the next few days. Every time I tried to install any Linux distribution, it would hang and die midway through. It got to the point where I'd done it so many times that I could predict the sequence of RPMs or .debs as they were written to disk. Then, I remembered a Knoppix CD I had lying around. Let's give one for the Knopper, because I actually got to a shell prompt. Now, I thought, I could just run lilo and solve everything. Unfortunately, knoppix aliases its drives in such a way that I couldn't mount my first drive read/write. Not that this would have happened anyway, because there's no driver that could possibly mount an NTFS volume read/write. (Well, maybe in Redmond, where they may be working on the first "shared source" distribution of Linux. :-() The machine crashed and rebooted every twenty minutes, giving me only so much time to think. I did have one truly imaginative moment, when I tried running the Windows installer under Wine. It worked for about two screens.
What finally broke the logjam was knoppix-install, which installs the CD-ROM to the hard disk. Although there were enough read errors to render Linux useless, it did get a working boot sector onto my computer. Now, I could load the recovery console, and my problem was fixed with fixboot and fixmbr.
So now, I have a working computer -- for some value of working. I completed one successful disaster recovery backup, but I'm not sure if it was just luck that the machine didn't hang.
I am now in the market for an unaffordable new or used computer, about two years ahead of schedule. How about a used IBM Z-station?
Lessons I should learn from this:
(1) TANSTAAFL.
(2) No Fry's specials.
(3) Never give up.
(4) Never seek employment as a system administrator. (No worries here.)
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-09 02:40 am (UTC)Glad you're still with us in LJ form.