HDD Killers

So it seems that whenever I work on my file server, a cold cathode is destined to die. I believe that brings the total to 4 now, which is around £20. Here are some pictures of the latest tragedy, I actually broke it in two places, once when I was picking the case up and again when I was taking it out. Snap one, snap two, both snaps.

Anyhow, I also randomly took a picture of the wires behind the motherboard backplate in the file-server before I put the new bits in. I decided to include the picture in the page since most of my entries seem to be long, dry text (as Dan points out).

It’s a lot neater now though, (although still pretty messy). The new power supply is actually blue and all of the cables are sleaved blue (apart from the ATX connector and extra 4pin ATX connector which are silver), so it fits the theme pretty nicely. Overall I’m happy with it, although I’ll now have to get another blue neon…

As I was working on the PC I must have been concentrating pretty hard, because it wasn’t until I saw the blood on the otherwise clean steal side-panel that I realised I’d cut myself.

My main PC also now has the new motherboard and 64bit CPU in, not benchmarked it or anything, but it seems to be working fairly OK.The only problem I’m having is that every so often (it’s done it twice now) is that Windows will BSOD for no apparent reason with the error, “MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION”, so I think I’ll have to reinstall, although what I’m actually going to do is just leave it alone and hope it stops doing it. The last time I swopped a Windows HDD between completely different hardware it was fine with it and that was with a different manufacturer of motherboard chipset, but when I moved on to a different motherboard again it choked and died. Windows is a funny ol’ thing like that, I can’t see why it’s even a problem so long as the correct drivers are installed, but whatever.

I only had a couple of problems with setup. The first was that I didn’t have network access, because the onboard LAN is handled by the chipset and I didn’t have chipset drivers. So I had to borrow someone’s USB flash drive, download the nForce driver onto it and then install it on my PC from there. No biggie really, was only a problem because I don’t have the motherboard CD, but I’m up and running now so it’s all good. The second problem was that my SATA HDD wasn’t being detected, but upon looking through the BIOS all I had to do was enable SATA on the motherboard and it was sorted.

Now a quick note on the site. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve changed the skin to one that’s almost identical, save for the fact it has a side-bar. Well I’ve gone and added a few links down the side. However WordPress sucks fairly significantly and even though I gave each of the links a category, it decided to spit them out in alphabetical order. Hmm, how about no… So I hardcoded the links into sidebar.php in the skin and split them out into the two categories, looks much nicer. Also fiddled around with the markup a tad to clean it up a bit and altered a few styles hither and thither to compensate for the markup alterations, so if the page looks a bit phooked, just refresh the page to get the new style-sheet and it should be displayed correctly, no biggie.