Fucking Computers

Computers hate me. There’s no other possible explanation.

I’m currently in a combination of upgrade hell and the worst deja-vu ever.

I have a nice computer, dual Athlon processors, lots of ram, etc. It’s about a year and a half old. A large proportion of the cost was paid by The People With No Lives, my good friends.

About a year ago, I was having problems with it suddenly deciding a hard drive wasn’t going to work right any more, but that hard drive being fine if I put it in another machine. Eventually the problem got to the point that with two hard drives, it would just sit there clicking – and I traced the clicking noise to the power switch, not the hard drives as I’d originally thought. I cured the problem by putting the biggest freaking power supply you could buy in it. It’s been fine since then, except if I started running SETI@home it would get unreliable and freeze up way too often.

A couple of days ago I decided to upgrade it. I’ve already mentioned some of the problems that caused. Over the last two days I’ve finally gotten everything I can think of sorted out and working right. But I left the old 80Gb drive in the machine in case I needed to get something off it. As well as the main 80Gb drive (hda) and this old 80Gb drive (hdc), there is another 40Gb drive that mostly stores MP3s and backups, hdb.

Today around lunch time I started seeing some weird drive errors from hdb in the logs. Since it’s not that important a drive, I thought I’d unmount it until I could get home. Except I couldn’t. unmount told me the drive was busy, but lsof couldn’t find any open files on it. So I tried to reboot, but the shutdown process didn’t get any further than saying that it was shutting down, and never actually shut anything down. My other open sessions on the computer kept going fine.

When I got home from work, I thought I’d make it shutdown. But shutdown, reboot and ctrl-alt-delete did the same thing as before. I wasn’t thinking all that straight, so I just hit the reset switch. In retrospect I probably should have manually shut down some of the daemons, especially innd which tends to do nasty things if it gets killed without doing a proper shutdown.

When I tried to boot, it refused to recognize both hdb *and* hdc. That’s not good. So I opened the case and pulled out the drive carriers. Hey, that drive fan doesn’t look like it’s spinning, so I touched it. OUCH. It was spinning all right – it took a big chunk out of my finger tip and sprayed blood all over my shirt, keyboard and monitor. Unfortunately I also took a fan blade out, so scratch one fan.

I tried a lot of permutations and combinations of drives plugged in and not plugged in. Sometimes the BIOS wouldn’t recognize any drives at all, other times it would only recognize the drives on the second ide controller (and would attempt to boot the old version of Linux), and sometimes, if I held my mouth just right and stood on one foot, it would recognize the hda drive and boot correctly.

So that’s how I’m leaving it tonight. Tomorrow, I’m hoping against hope that the two powered off drives will have cooled down and I can boot them again. If that’s the case, then I’m off to FrozenCPU in Fairport to buy a couple of CPU coolers and three hard drive coolers.

Man, I hope that’s it.