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SLEDGEHAMMER-OPERATED KEYBOARD

dead system

Finished up the backups/compares of the drives from the main system last night.

A while ago, I tried starting it up. It beeped like crazy.

So I pulled all the connections except the mouse, keyboard monitor and speakers, I also disconnected thre power cable I'd added to the add-on USB card.

Stiill beeped. Turned out to be the "monitor panel" I have in the top drive bay. I'd pulled the temp sensors it uses while the system was open. Turned out it was unhappy about that. So I pulled the power connection for it too. So now all it would do is serve as a mount for the CPU fan speed control and maybe a couple of USB ports.

Alas, when I plugged the power connector back onto the USB card, I must have gotten it one pin off. At power one there was a flash on the power llight and a complaint from the UPS.

Opened the system up again, got the connector on right (it's the same type as on floppy drives... *sigh*)

System poewered up ok, but I got the "Loader Error 3" message most of the way thru Windows starttup.

So I dug out the XP Pro disk I'd bought years back to upgrade the system.

Partway thru installing the system shut down. And did so again within a short time on successive tries. So short I had to resort to a paperclip to get the CD out of the drive.

So the main system is dead until I can get it looked at. *hopefully* it's just the power supply. If it's the motherboard, I'll have to dig out the newer motherboard I have sitting around (due to misdiagnosis of a problem on a box I was fixing for someone). And then dig up a CPU & RAM.

At that point it may make more sense to just have ENU throw a system together for me once I get my SSI.

At least I can get files from the drives as I need them thanks to what I've spent the days since the initial failure doing.

Just take a while to grab files as needed.