There has been a death at Slightlynarrow HQ.
This morning, HAL9000, my faithful Linux desktop machine was finally pronounced dead.
you can skip the eulogy, but read the bit after so u can see just how imensely BONED I am
HAL began life as a dual boot windows98/LFS-Linux machine in August 2002, His Athlon 1800XP was happy to overclock, his Nvidia Ge4 hit the spot nicely. He served admirably as a windows games machine, a windows digital audio workstation, and as a general linux desktop and media centre. In 2004 I bought an ATI Radeon on the cheap, beacause I REALLY wanted to play Richard Burns Rally, which the NV did not support (DX9 shaders if anyone cares). The Radeon was stroppy as FUCK, more so in Linux than in windows, also it's TV-output (in any OS) was VILE, which, considering it's linux persona was my entire media thingy, was quite shit. SO HAL was split in two. His windows drive, went off with the Radeon and his windows HD to meet up with a new CPU and motherboard, and became SAL9000, A Cubase and fast racing car games machine. HAL then became a fulltime Linux machine, performing all non-cubase-and-cars related tasks. When My TV blew up last year, I jammed a TV card in HAL, and he became my TV and video, on top of already being my hi-fi and dvd player. By the time he first became a little ill, HAL had half a Terrabyte of storage and 1GB of RAM, and not having to ever run windows, stayed clocked at his natural speed and ran cool as ice. The first trouble began last year, random shutdowns, I traced it to the power supply fan (overheating the PSU caused the +12v rail to go out of tolerance, tripping a protect mode on the main system HD=bye bye computer....was almost funny watching linux realising it's HD had gone and slowing giving up on staying running). About 5 or 6 weeks ago, I rebooted HAL a couple of times to test a boot-cd for the new laptop. During a couple of these reboots, there was an odd delay between the power reseting and the POST screen (the VERY first thing you see, or don't see if your BIOS has a nice splashscreen). And once, it even took so long, the monitor fell asleep. The next time HAL rebooted, was Thursday morning last week, because of a power failure. But he did not come back. An hour later, while I was almost tearfully explaining what happned, to Leanne.....HAL just booted again....I was about 5 feet away at the time. I spent the weekend updating every single program on HAL, cos it'd been FAR too long. It took 4 days to download and compile (Gentoo linux builds each program just for you :D takes a while, but the benefits are stunning) 1700 different packages....my fault, it was a LOOOOOONG time, and certain core things had changed. Anyway, yesterday morning, I rebooted to see what damage the updates had done....and NOTHING.
And so began 24 hours of swapping out every component, replacing the CMOS battery, thumping the BIOS chip, reseating RAM, installing new power suppplies. HAL is dead. Most likely cause is a dead motherboard.
The irony is, he was about to be retired. With the arrival of this laptop, HAL was essentially doing just keeping 510GB of hard discs turning and being a tv/video/dvdthingy...all the day to day computer stuff is better done on the lapper, it's faster, and built for linux (it's an update of one they used to offer preloaded with linux, and will again soon).
Fairwell HAL, you did me proud. I'm genuinely GUTTED. I'm pouring this crap out here to try and think it through for myself.
So how fucked am I?
No videos, of which I have many still to watch (there are many on DVDs of course, but I tend to watch em then burn em, so stuff on disc I tend to have seen). No downloads No Hifi No NEW ORDER, apart from about 1GB on the laptop. No TV (the F1 season starts in 65 hours) No access to fuck all basically.
I dunno what to do.
I started with "buy a new motherboard the same for a tenner on ebay and pay extra to get it here by Friday morning." Passed through "use the windows machine as a life support for the hard drives, boot it from a linux CD, and serve all the drives on the network." And I'm now toying with "fuck it, windows machine, insides come out, linux machine insides go in. Sling the Radeon, and everything else in the box except the CPU and RAM, and put the cards and drives from Linux box in instead, leaving only any grouchiness linux might have with a motherboard chipset changed to worty about".
In fact,in typing all this shite out for you lot to ignore, I reckon the last option may be the way to go. I can live without DOS-XP for...ooooohhh...ever, I should imagine, and even if I want to use it, the laptop has a new M-Aduio Ozone interface and is almost as good as the main winbox for audio. I can then build a new winbox at my financial leisure.
SIGH, I've avoided this enough, I must now get up from this pile of PC guts around me, eat, and then return and start trying to get something bootable sorted before bedtime (about noon-1400)
WIsh me luck, this is a dark day for me.
Sorry for your loss Doc
I lost one of my drives the other day (click of doom!) but found the funds for a new 500GB. Had a spare 20 with a boot going already on it, so I was relatively back in business minus a few gigs of FLAC torrents. I should really upgrade the mobo, but if it serves me so well for 7 years, why bother? Aside from flashy new multiplayer games, everything else runs beauty on it.