Server Upgrade Postoned
I was going to upgrade this server with a machine that I have sitting at the house. The new machine is a 933mhz, 128mb RAM machine with dual scsi drives - mirrored. This old one is a 400mhz with 128mb RAM. I was also going to move the drives from this machine to the new machine and increase the hard drive space - not that I’m running out of space or anything, these drives have everything on them.
Unfortunately, when I tried to check my email Sunday morning on my own machine, I got a frozen screen. Nothing moved on the desktop no matter what I tried. I decided to hit the power button to see what happened. The machine didn’t boot at all. I just got a black screen and none of the familiar beeps that one gets when booting up.
I opened the case to peer at the motherboard which usually does no good. This time I noticed bulging capacitors - the same fate that has taken at least one other board of mine.
I pulled the scsi drives out of the soon-to-be-server, grabbed the drives from the recently deceased computer case and popped them in, careful to keep the drives installed in order. After some tinkering and - believe it or not - minimal cursing on my part I got the machine to boot up. The old familiar WindowsTM boot screen popped up on the monitor. I know, but there are programs that I have to have that require WindowsTM to run. Otherwise I would be running a *nix.
If I had been running a Linux distro, I would have been better off. I have run both Debian and Fedora on the machine without any driver problems. As it was I fought with driver issues for a while, the monitor wasn’t coming up with anything better than 24 colors. I pulled out the video card, replacing it with one I had on the shelf (the good news is that the old card still works ;)). Hmm… still needing drivers for it I reached for the CD that I just knew would have the drivers for the card and… ugh - I needed drivers for the CD-ROM drive.
I tried downloading drivers and dropping them into place but that didn’t help at all. I finally resorted to running the Add New Hardware “wizard” and that found the non plug and play CD drive. Next I popped in the CD and started to install drivers… except that the CD was for a different video card. It didn’t dawn on me until I got the CD drive working that I had seen the logo for SIS video cards every time the computer rebooted - which is frequently when you are installing a machine “fresh” - and I had the CD for ATI cards.
Fortunately, I have a folder for drivers on my hard drive and this was a driver that I had installed before. I browsed to the folder with the driver installation program and clicked it. No longer limited to 24 colors makes a heck of a difference.
As a side note: Steve that means the old 400 is still cranking away as a web and email server.
It also means I have to start looking for the replacement machine again.
