Dear all, Thank you for the advise on adding the ide drive to my computer. I could not get the ide drive to even recognize. After some monkey-ing around, I decided to pull all the drives out of my computer and add 5 brand new 36GB 10,000 RPM 80pin SCSI drives to my computer. I printed out the Software RAID How-to, ordered a pizza, bought 4 cans of Mountain Dew from the soda machine, and went to work...
That was 2.5 hours ago. Now here I am writing to you. You see I could go home and tell my wife all that had happened but she would be half asleep and just stare blankly. Even awake she could not begin to sympathize with me, or even understand in the least what I am talking about. This is where you all come in. Tonight, you will unwillingly lend me a sympathetic ear. Now where was I? Oh yes, my new hard disks. About a month ago my boss decided to order 10-15 (I lost count) of these hard drives. He did not read the fine print and accidentally ordered 80pin hot swap drives. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade right? I happened to have 5 80 pin to 68/50 pin SCSI converters lying around in the back and used those to connect these hard disks to my back-plane-less computer. Geocentric (my beloved Debian box) is a IBM Z-Pro with a Xeon 1Ghz (I could add a second processor), 1.5GB of RAM, a dual head video card, etc; all housed in a 50,000lb case. Way too much for what I use it for, but nice none-the-less. I haven't turned this computer off in months. Stable as can be, even though I was running SID. Btw, thanks to all Debian project people out there, I am constantly amazed at how functional even the 'unstable' tree is! I think I'll get "Debian 4 Life" tattooed on me somewhere... Ok, I'm loosing focus. Geocentric has 6 or 7 slots that you can add drives to on these little rails that come with the case. It took about an hour to figure out how to insert all of those drives in such a way that they would all fit. But, I did it! I then had to somehow cable these together, with the one cable I had to daisy chain them all together. It was impossible. In a moment of "ah-ha" I carefully removed two of the pressed on connectors to the ribbon cables, and then just as carefully pressed them back on with the help of a vice and a micrometer. With my newly customized cable I went back to work. After some twisting to get the connectors oriented correctly with the SCA -> 68pin adapter, they all snapped in perfectly. I would like to take a moment to add out of the 5 converters I had, I had three different brands, mismatched throughout the chain. Finally getting the computer assembled I plugged it in... A smile on my face... A 1 INCH SPARK ARCED FROM ONE OF THE CONVERTERS... Then... My main board started to smoke. I unplugged my computer... Put it on a cart and wheeled it to the back room. I'm going to sleep now... tomorrows another day... Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
