She's alive

I’m not sure if I mentioned it to anyone other than Chris, but Anna was down and out all this week. I was home to Durham this past weekend and while I was gone the power went out. Normally not a huge deal, just turn the computer on when I get in and set a few clocks. Not this time. I hit the power button on Anna and she made this funny fan noise - not a great sound, and then it seemed like it was hanging on the IDE drive detection. It found my optical drives, but said [None] where it should have had a couple of hard disks. Boot Failure. Obviously.

So I used my laptop all week and tried to not think about how insanely quiet my apartment was. So tonight after an interesting day at work, I was up for opening her up. I took the IDE connectors out of the motherboard and stuck my hard disks in where my optical drives were. Tried booting - four [None]‘s. Crap. Went into the bios - it recognized my drives. I rebooted and voila! GRUB popped up. I chose Gentoo… going well, except that it numbers the drives depending on where they are in the IDE chain - and now my drives are Secondary. So it had a kernel panic. Reboot, into Windows this time and here I am - using about the only piece of software that I bothered to install on the Windows partition - Opera.

I’m going to see if I can’t get the bios to recognize the drives in the primary spot and be rid of this whole mess - and Windows.

2003-12-06 16:45

I’m not exactly sure what the problem was, but I seem to have it sorted out now. I am current back on my Gentoo disk and feeling good that I didn’t lose anything. I also took the time while I was in Windows to whoar a bunch of movies and music off the network.