On the Brink
Mike is dying…
One of his hard drives is unusable already. The oldest harddisk on Mike was acting erratically already, and the SMART reports were not hopeful at all. The 120GB disk’s sector 0 is unreadable now, and along with is goes almost 3 years of customization on the Windows XP, a lot of stored information in the form of browser history, bookmarks and download lists. My downloaded email is now out of reach in the Thunderbird profile directory as well (although I’m not entirely convinced that it’s lost.) Around 20GiB of unclassified music is also trapped on that drive.
Another of the hard disks, a 300GB hosting some of my oldest and most favorite movies, is also making strange noises.
I tried to install Windows XP on a new disk, a 500GB WD, but I found out with heartache that Mike’s mainboard (a Gigabyte K8NS Pro) can’t (or won’t) boot from any of the 320 or 500 GB hard drives. It boots off a USB disk, but not from a standard SATA hard. Windows XP doesn’t even list the larger drives in it’s installation partition selection list. Fedora Core 8 is better, and it installs, but it won’t boot. I have three different SATA controllers (nForce and SiL are integrated in the chipset, and I’ve added an unnamed SATA card) but the larger drives remain unbootable.
Mike also doesn’t allow any more RAM than the 1GiB already installed. This happened a few months back. I’m guessing the empty RAM slots are damaged or something (maybe by dust.)
All in all, Mike is on life support. I’ve learned so much and done so much with him, that now that I’ve turned him off, after close to 3 years of almost continuous upness, the absence of the whirring sound of the 8 fans in its case is driving me crazy. It’s like I’m told that my leg needs to be amputated, and I’m hoping against hope that I can keep it.
