2003-12-29 #1

Well, Damn

Ok so I have this brilliant idea. Since I don't like this K6/2 thing, and I need to test out the PII/350 shell, I decide I am going to transplant all the disks (and all the PC133 memory) into the PII/350 shell. Ok, so I decide I am going to add the 40G drive which tested good a few weeks back in on the secondary channel, so we have a reasonable amount of storage again. So I do this. The result is that I get DMA errors on the secondary channel (which I didn't see on the primary) which tells me that the secondary channel on this board is fried, right? Ok, so all the disks and most of the RAM goes back into the K6/2 thing. I power it up, and immediately notice that while the disks are powered, they are not connected to the IDE controller. So I kill the power immediately. And while looking around for a tool or a cable or something, I get this loud BANG which sounds to me like the CRT in the ancient monitor letting go. But the monitor is still intact, and it takes me a couple of seconds to notice the very black wisp of smoke wafting from the K6/2's power supply. Ok, so great. That pisses me off for Sunday and that's that.

Today I transplanted the power supply from the PII into the K6/2 and, with the exception of the piece of crap secondary IDE chain, everything works again.

Although on reflection it occurs to me that the secondary chain couldn't recognize any of the three large disks I tried was due to the fact that it has an ancient bios that can't deal with 40G disks which might have been my problem the entire time with this thing.

Well, damn.

In better news, I got to play with my first Opteron64 based system today. It does little to improve my opinion of AMD hardware. It has this SATA disk which RedHat 8.0 doesn't recognize. I think I have a handle on it though, we will see tomorrow.