Thursday, July 12, 2007

Stupid hardware tricks

My backup server (one of the oldest boxes I still have in service, a 900MHz P3 Celeron) finally got on my nerves one too many times this week, so I replaced the motherboard/CPU/RAM with a Asus M2NPV-VM, a Athlon64 X2 3800+, and 2GB of DDR2/667. Since it was down anyway, I upgraded it to Fedora 7 (x86_64). That all went fine, but now the thing won't boot from the 3ware controller (7500-8), and for the life of me I can't figure out why... All I get is a blank screen and a blinking cursor. I've reinstalled grub, but the behavior hasn't changed. I have to wonder if there's some kind of incompatibility between the board and the 3ware card.

Monday I became the proud owner of an ancient Power Computing Mac clone. I thought it would be nice to have something PPC around that I could test Fedora on. After poking at it a bit and asking around on IRC, I found out it is an "Old World" Mac, which means you have to jump through some hoops to get it to boot Linux. Whee.

Oh, and I finally decided that my 2-year-old (give or take) LG DVD burner is dead. It spins, it will eject media, but it won't detect media in the tray. Next time I reboot, I think I'm going to replace it with one of the Lite-Ons we carry at the store. (Don't get me wrong... The LG burner was great right up until the point that it died. I'd probably get another LG, except these Lite-On burners seem good, they're cheap, and I have them on-hand.)

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