(no subject)

[geojlc]

First of all, wish Jeff luck. A permanent (well, as permanent as jobs ever get anymore) position opened up where he's currently contracting. He ok'd it with the contractor and put in an application. In any case, he's interviewing today. So wish him luck! :-)

Secondly, I thought I was all full of mad 1337 computer skillz yesterday. But today I'm proven wrong...

Yesterday, I took computers apart and then put them back together, only cooler.

I put a new sound card in my main desktop. Now I can utilize the nice 5.1 speakers I have set up in my office. They sound really cool! I even got the surround working in WoW (which took some doing...). Now, if I don't remember I have surround sound, I can get surprised by noises in game coming behind me! But the surround music for when I'm working is also pretty cool.

I also took out the hard drive on kitty (our server box) that we are pretty sure is dead. Or at least goes into a kernal panic when we try to boot linux. I suppose there is still the possibility of a corrupted linux install. Anyway, I took the secondary drive in there (that had still had the windows install on it from before the box turned into a server) and turned it into the master drive with the thought of doing a final backup of anything on there, wiping the drive, and installing linux to have my server working again. I made the mistake of closing the case and rebuilding the stack-o-computers before trying to do stuff.

Well, although I'm pretty sure I loaded into windows and did stuff yesterday (including using the keyboard), it's all kaput now. I do remember hearing a slightly annoying and yet distressing beeping coming from one of the 3 boxes. I started turning computers off until I found the culprit. It turned out to be the server box. I don't remember how I turned it off, but I have a feeling it was unsafely... (power buttons are sometimes not your friend).

So this morning I made ISO disks to install linux on the server box (it was not wanting to install from DVD yesterday. sigh.) The keyboard in the KVM wasn't working. then, when in windows, the beeping started and (I think) the mouse, and thus my only interface tool, froze. I'm afraid that the hard reset I did broke something. Now I can't get it to actually load windows. If I choose the 'start windows normally' option, I get a really fast blue screen of death (like just a flash) followed by a restart. If I try to go into safe mode, I get all the loading text and then it just restarts. It doesn't recognize the ISO disk at all (although it could be the disk). It will recognize the DVD, although not boot from it (like yesterday). Only this time it recognizes the DVD and then restarts.

So, I don't really have time today to putz with it (work stuff. class design. choir concert tonight! yikes! Songs I don't know and other songs I'm still a bit shaky on!). I'm thinking that maybe tomorrow I'll take the stack-o-computers apart again, open up the server box, and start playing with things while the case is open... Bah! So much for my mad leet skillz. :-)



So, how's your day going?

Comments

[seattlejo.livejournal.com]

Crossing my fingers and toes for Mr Jeff!

[spencer-chatfie.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping the best for you, Jeff.

Jeri, you could be having memory problems with the server. Back in the day, windows would run on marginal machines that linux would not run on. Best luck there, too.

[geojlc.livejournal.com]

We thought of that and memtest was the first thing we did. No errors over several runs overnight (8 runs maybe?)