Jiggery-Pokery

Shortly after my Random Goodies post, I decided to throw the Sennheizers on and listed to a little music. So, clicked on WinAMP, clicked to open a file, and browsed out of the Gorillaz' Demon Days album to find something a little lighter. First stop was the newly acquired Johnny Horton CD. Well, not so fast. Although the directory was there, there was a complete lack of music. Hmmm... ok. Maybe I did some weird cut and paste and they're in another directory. Oh well, let's try Billy Joel... er, no, that's gone too. Ace of Base, nope.

As you might imagine, panic started to set in a bit as every album I've ripped from my CDs is missing. "Ok, maybe something is wrong with WinAMP." So I opened explorer, browsed to the music on the server... nope, still gone. Okay. Opened WinAMP again, which was still defaulting to the gorillaz directory. IT still had music, but nothing else did. Hoping that it was some kind of networking glitch, I decided to VNC into my server ( it's running headless, so no direct connection available ). Umm, no, VNC is down too.

Okay, as a last resort, maybe something in the server is just a little nuts and it needs a reboot. I didn't want to kill my runtime ( which extended back into the Summer of '05 ), but it had to be done. Here's where things get really interesting, because after hitting the reset button, my server just won't boot. D'oh!

Now I'm pissed. I move a monitor and keyboard over to the server to take a look around. My SuSE install was only barely booting into the kernel before reporting that some critical file was corrupted. Now I'm starting to think the hard drive died, at least for a second, before remembering that the music and the OS are on two separate physical disks. So either TWO drives died, or something is seriously wrong with my hardware.

My next course of action was to load up the Ultimate Boot CD for some hardware diagnostics. Well, yeah, that's a great idea, except that while the CD's menu would load, within two keystrokes I would always be sitting at an error screen. Swapped out CDROMs to make sure it wasn't bad, and even tested the CD in my workstation. Both were fine. I had a dead system. Insert your favorite four letter F word here.

After regaining my composure, I decided I had two courses of action. First, I could continue diagnosing the problem, working one PC part at a time until I narrowed down the bad component and replaced it. Or, I could just do a massive upgrade right now, swapping out motherboard, CPU, and power supply at once to just get up and running as quickly as possible. Since it was already late and I was tired, I chose option two.

Luckily for me, my very kind brother Brandon had previously offered me his old mobo w/ 3ghz Athlon, and I knew I had a spare power supply. From here on things started to go a little smoother. Drove across town to get the mobo, came back, and swapped parts. A fairly uneventful process if you've ever done this kind of work.

Once everything was assembled and running, I was overjoyed to find all my files intact. Didn't have to reinstall or repair the OS to get working with the new motherboard ( unlike some other OSes I could mention ), just had to supervise the autodetection of the new drivers. SuSE is really good about this, and I didn't have to intervene whatsoever. Really, the only place I had to reconfigure anything at all was where my network services were concerned. Since the new mobo included an onboard gigabit ethernet adapter, I wanted to use it and take one of my 10/100 cards out. This of course means mapping services to the new NIC ( In YaST, NICs are identified by their MAC address. ) like Samba and setting the internet interface for my firewall, but this was to be expected. All and all, a pretty painless fix.

Anyway, my apologies to my less technically inclined listeners, but this was a rough two hours for me that I had to get off my chest. Everything worked out in the end, but at the point that I realized I may have lost all my music and would have to re-rip all my CDs, I felt a bit ill... that was a lot of work.