For a few weeks, my file server has been acting up. I know — I sound like a broken record. Seems to happen to me a lot.
I suspect some of that has to do with the origins of this machine — cobbled together from bits and pieces. Case here, motherboard from there, RAM from two places, two generations of DVD burners, and six hard drives collected over the years (4 x IDE, 2 x SATA). Q and A? What’s that? It’s not a Dell, for sure.
A few weeks ago, in one fell swoop, my external sound “card”, a SoundBlaster Extigy, stopped working, the same day that Windows decided to stop recognizing one of the two SATA drives. One of the two — and since they were working as a RAID drive, that really meant that both of the drives were unavailable.
Odd.
I tinkered, I tinkered, I scratched my head some, and I tinkered. This week, I brought the server out into the daylight, popped the hood, and jiggled the SATA wiring.
Got my drives back.
And the machine would reboot itself about a minute after I selected the user account.
I managed to get in and salvage most of the stuff off of the boot drive — in box, address book, drivers for XP. Little stuff like that. But, for the life of me, I could not explain why it was acting so wonky.
So, today I unplugged five of the hard drives, and rebooted — I wanted to make sure I had just the boot drive connected. I planned to nuke the boot drive, reinstall XP, and start all over again. And curse Microsoft. It’s almost the national past time in our family.
But it booted fine. And runs fine. And it’s smooth and stable. So, I’m burning a few CD’s, and will try adding back in drives, one at a time. Maybe the root of the problem is here. My money is on the “I” drive — the music library.
So, more to follow. I did not pitch it all out the window today, as I had planned.
Oh, and I have a space machine in the basement. It also won’t boot to Windows. When I got it, it would not boot to BIOS — would not boot at all. Got it to where it now boots, always, to a LiveCD of Linux — running Linux from the CD, not the hard drive. I think Windows on the hard drive is corrupt. Not that it runs well, I may try to get into the hard drive and see if there’s data to rescue. Machine belongs to the son of a friend. Free computer repair is, well, free. I’m just pleased that I can get it to boot now.
Oh, and still no sound.
(Update: Sound is back.? This might be a first — salvaging an XP install without having to format.)
