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kengrThe weekend was not kind to my computers.
Kalonia (an IBM Thinkcentre I use for torrents and as a secondary media server/player) went into a coma. That is, when I got up that morning, the power was on but the Teamviewer connection was down. Switching the TV to the VGA input that Kalonia was hooked to, and rebooting didn't help. It'd power up but no video or other stuff.
So I dug it out (had various things on top of it) and took it to the kitchen table which doubles as my workbench. No go, still wasn't responding to things.
So I dug out the hard drive, and stuck it in a Mobile Rack, so I could truy it one a different system. It was readable in Bench (an old Dell Dimension I use for that sort of thing) so I figure it wasn't the problem.
So I put Boskone 2 (a system that died months back) on the table and finished stripping drives (and the all important mobile Rack) from it.
Then Ploor 3 (the Dell Dimension 5100 I got via Freecycle a while back) went on the table and I pulled the (empty) second SATA drive out of it, and replaced it with the 2 TB SATA drive that'd been in an external dock attached to Kalonia.
I also stuck the mobile rack from Boskone 2 in. *That* was a pain. It was hard to get the IDE cable attached to the back of the rack. It was even harder to get the power connector attached (mostly because of the way DEL ran the IDE an floppy cables).
Then I spent the next hour trying to get the IDE drive from Kalonia to be recognized in Ploor3. First, I had to go into the BIOS and tell the system that it was "on". Being able to disable drives that way is handy, but it's a pain when you forget to do it.
Drive 3 not found. Grrr.
Various messing around with changing connectors, moving the drive to a different rack "cartridge, and finally getting annoyed and swapping out the rack for another one.
As I was pulling the rack from Boskone 2 out of the system, I noted the cable running along one side. And had a horrible suspicion about what the problem had been.
Yep, it was a mobile rack where the key lock doesn't just lock the drive "cartridge" into the rack, but it also controls *power* to the rack. Arrrgghh.
I finished swapping in the other rack, and made a point to scribble PWR above the lock so I wouldn't make that mistake again.
Plug the drive cartridge in, boot up... Power indicator on rack, Yay! "Drive 3 not found"
What?!
Then I took a closer look at the message. It was "Drive 3 Primary IDE slave not found".
Oh no. They wouldn't. They didn't..
Power off pull drive, open up, move jumpers from "cable select" to "slave", plug back in, power up.
Yay it works.
Many muttered impreciations about Dell continuing to use Master/slave rather than cable select like everyone else had at the time the system was built occurred while waiting for the system to finish loading windows.
A quick check to make sure all the drives were showing up, and it was time to shut down, close up the box, drag it back over to the desk and connect all the cables.
Then came doing various bits of setup so it could take over for Kalonia. Since it had 4 gig of RAM rather than the 2 gig that kalonia maxed out at, it performed rather better.
Monday morning. Get up, go to computers. see power light on Ploor 3 blinking amber. Try various things. No luck.
Open up service manual file. Great. Power supply or system board failure. Bleah.
Since Fay was coming over for TV night that night, I didn't feel like dragging things over to the table again. I just set up Boskone 3 (my other ThinkCentre) to take over the bare minimum I needed of Kalonia's tasks. I'll finish setting things up "properly" after I get the 2 TB drive out of Ploor 3 and put it in the external dock and things more functional.
I'll also see if I can hook Boskone 2's power supply up to Ploor 3. If I can, that'll let me see if the problem was the motherboard or the power supply (please be the power supply).
Kalonia (an IBM Thinkcentre I use for torrents and as a secondary media server/player) went into a coma. That is, when I got up that morning, the power was on but the Teamviewer connection was down. Switching the TV to the VGA input that Kalonia was hooked to, and rebooting didn't help. It'd power up but no video or other stuff.
So I dug it out (had various things on top of it) and took it to the kitchen table which doubles as my workbench. No go, still wasn't responding to things.
So I dug out the hard drive, and stuck it in a Mobile Rack, so I could truy it one a different system. It was readable in Bench (an old Dell Dimension I use for that sort of thing) so I figure it wasn't the problem.
So I put Boskone 2 (a system that died months back) on the table and finished stripping drives (and the all important mobile Rack) from it.
Then Ploor 3 (the Dell Dimension 5100 I got via Freecycle a while back) went on the table and I pulled the (empty) second SATA drive out of it, and replaced it with the 2 TB SATA drive that'd been in an external dock attached to Kalonia.
I also stuck the mobile rack from Boskone 2 in. *That* was a pain. It was hard to get the IDE cable attached to the back of the rack. It was even harder to get the power connector attached (mostly because of the way DEL ran the IDE an floppy cables).
Then I spent the next hour trying to get the IDE drive from Kalonia to be recognized in Ploor3. First, I had to go into the BIOS and tell the system that it was "on". Being able to disable drives that way is handy, but it's a pain when you forget to do it.
Drive 3 not found. Grrr.
Various messing around with changing connectors, moving the drive to a different rack "cartridge, and finally getting annoyed and swapping out the rack for another one.
As I was pulling the rack from Boskone 2 out of the system, I noted the cable running along one side. And had a horrible suspicion about what the problem had been.
Yep, it was a mobile rack where the key lock doesn't just lock the drive "cartridge" into the rack, but it also controls *power* to the rack. Arrrgghh.
I finished swapping in the other rack, and made a point to scribble PWR above the lock so I wouldn't make that mistake again.
Plug the drive cartridge in, boot up... Power indicator on rack, Yay! "Drive 3 not found"
What?!
Then I took a closer look at the message. It was "Drive 3 Primary IDE slave not found".
Oh no. They wouldn't. They didn't..
Power off pull drive, open up, move jumpers from "cable select" to "slave", plug back in, power up.
Yay it works.
Many muttered impreciations about Dell continuing to use Master/slave rather than cable select like everyone else had at the time the system was built occurred while waiting for the system to finish loading windows.
A quick check to make sure all the drives were showing up, and it was time to shut down, close up the box, drag it back over to the desk and connect all the cables.
Then came doing various bits of setup so it could take over for Kalonia. Since it had 4 gig of RAM rather than the 2 gig that kalonia maxed out at, it performed rather better.
Monday morning. Get up, go to computers. see power light on Ploor 3 blinking amber. Try various things. No luck.
Open up service manual file. Great. Power supply or system board failure. Bleah.
Since Fay was coming over for TV night that night, I didn't feel like dragging things over to the table again. I just set up Boskone 3 (my other ThinkCentre) to take over the bare minimum I needed of Kalonia's tasks. I'll finish setting things up "properly" after I get the 2 TB drive out of Ploor 3 and put it in the external dock and things more functional.
I'll also see if I can hook Boskone 2's power supply up to Ploor 3. If I can, that'll let me see if the problem was the motherboard or the power supply (please be the power supply).
