Mikey1280 said:
Has something gone wrong again null?
Yes and no.
Despite being on holiday from school now, I've been going in this week running the lights on the junior school play. I took my laptop with me yesterday and on Tuesday and will probably be doing the same again tonight (this is the last night). This is for two reasons:
a) Before the play starts I'm also working on a robot I'm making for a competition this Saturday, laptop is needed for programming and making the documentation.
b) Once I can't do any more of that I need entertainment before the play starts, laptop provides this (overhauling my website slowly over the summer, rewriting the backend navigation code when away from home - and therefore forum distractions).
lay-z-boy said:
Thats what you said last time god'dammit.
Hold on, does that mean you wont be buying from any company that something goes wrong with?
Sorry? I know it is, that's what I said in my above post:
I learnt my lesson though and managed to recover the data
That was referring to last time hence 'I learnt' as opposed to 'I have learnt' which I would use if referring to this time. Aside from that I haven't managed to recover the data this time anyway so couldn't be talking about it (only incentive for recovering data is log analysis to see when it happened). And the whole "I learnt my lesson" bit was referring to the keeping of back-ups, not the choice of drive manufacturer. Though it is true to say that in future I will be avoiding Maxtor because I've had *two* drives fail incase you didn't realise. Also you've got a few punctuation mistakes in your post, it should be "That's" not "Thats" and "g'dammit" not "god'dammit'. The apostrophe represents missing letters and there were none in your spelling so it wasn't necessary. Oh dear oh dear oh dear I'm pedantic today. Ignore me.
Right with that out the way here's the bit you are more likely interested in; the server status. A friend of mine donated me a new hard disk on Monday, Western Digital Caviar SE 40gB 5400rpm IDE. Which is the exact disk I would have bought if I had to buy a replacement I think. Great, I thought when I got it, should be back up and running in no time. How wrong I was. Upon connecting the disk up and starting the Windows installer the problem became apparent. At the 'Windows installer is detecting hardware' stage, the screen went blank and never came back. Thinking it was most likely a drive issue despite having a new one, I tried every possible combination of drive configurations (primaries, secondaries, masters and slaves) with the CD-ROM and new hard disk. All of them caused the same problem. I then tried disconnecting the new hard drive and loading the installer. It loaded perfectly, except for the slight problem that I couldn't do anything with no disk connected. And that's where I left it. I was out all of Tuesday and Wednesday so couldn't do any further work.
On another different but related topic I've taken some of the downtime as an opportunity to install better cooling so if/when I get it working again I will hopefully be installing FAH on it (never did before because the CPU heat caused everything else to heat up too - particularly the hard drive - yet it still died with the CPU idle).
As for how I'm going to get it working yet I'm not sure. I'm worried of buying a new drive incase it turns out to be a motherboard fault and then I'll have wasted money and still won't have fixed it. To further the problem I'm away from home for about 2 weeks as of Saturday morning (though will be coming back for the night at two points) so I need a solution pretty quickly, and it's gotta be one that is stable for two weeks at least. I may well end up biting the bullet and installing a Linux distro on it to see if the installer gets any further. Slight problem is that I have very little Linux experience in general. Right now, I'm going to have my breakfast then do some reading about SME server.
Hope this explain things, null