BMN Machine Maintenance

Good Morning

     5:30 in the morning and I've been up for an hour and a half already; just like the good old days, eh? This PC is making some odd noises. Yesterday Ron from Desertgate/Genesys gave me a couple older style ATA-IDE hard drives. I had asked because I think this PC is showing signs of imminent failure. If I had to guess, I'd say this hard drive is ten years old. I've been moving files off it all week. This morning the BMN PC did not post (boot.) Yikes! I pulled the cover, which wouldn't come free until I whacked it a good one with the base of both hands. Luckily for us that jolt made the computer boot.

     I've got to decide whether the passwords and whatnot on this PC are worth the hassle of trying to clone this drive which may contain bad sectors over to one of these other drives. Whatever I do, I better do it soon, this morning's event is an undeniable  harbinger. My problem is I'm seriously rusty with PC repair. I suppose this could be helpful.   I managed to stay on the sidelines through the whole Serial ATA or SATA hard drive era, so I do not have all that information clouding my brain. All, I need to do is remove one of the CD/DVD burners and then pick one of the two drives I got from Ron and make that drive master or slave like the CDrom I removed.

    Once the computer recognizes the new drive I've got to either backup my home folder or locate a reliable Linux drive cloning package and move the entire OS from one drive to the other. Sounds pretty straight forward right?I'm just glad it booted. Working on old PCs  is hard enough with caffeine. At four AM I was in no condition to do any trouble shooting let alone make a decent plan and implement it. 

BMN-Machine-Guts-Exposed

What a mess huh? Cables running to and fro in a seemingly hodgepodge higgledy-piggledy manner. If the two installed hard drives are ten years old,  I'd have to guess that I've been using this case for twenty years.  Maybe it is time to look at a new PC.  This mother board is a dual core processor, with 64 bit architecture. Let me see if I can look up this main board… hang on.

CPU

• Supports 64-bit AMD® Athlon™ 64, Sempron™ and Turion™ 64 processor (Socket 754)
• Athlon 64: 2800+ ~ 3700+, Sempron 3100+
• Please refer to CPU Support for compatible CPU; the above description is for reference only.

Chipset

• VIA® K8M800 Chipset
- HyperTransport™ connection to AMD® Athlon™ 64 processor
- 8 or 16 bit control/address/data transfer both directions
- 800/600/400/200MHz "Double Data Rate" operation both direction
- AGP v3.0 compliant with 8x transfer mode
- Graphic integrated

• VIA® VT8237R Chipset
- Integrated Faster Ethernet LPC
- Integrated Hardware Sound Blaster/Direct Sound AC97 audio
- Ultra DMA 66/100/133 master mode PCI EIDE controller
- ACPI
- Supports 2 Serial ATA ports
- Supports 8 USB2.0 ports
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Pretty whoopdedoo stuff in there don't ya think? What? It don't make a lick of sense to you neither?  

Why I oughta. . .

Sandy and Buddy playing on top of the Crestone Tuesday morning February 7th 2012

 Today is my day off, but I really do have my work cut out.
My own to do list

1. Call lawyers.  A. Mine for the Shiny Red Blazer personal injury claim B. The lawyer we hired to probate Clara's estate
2. Make a dentist appointment in Mora. I missed the last one.
3. Continue with more laundry, house cleaning and cooking
4. Strenuous hike in the new boots
5. Fire up the Dodge and get a little firewood from the forest brought to the hilltop for blocking splitting and drying
   
6. Clone this Linux hard drive and swap the old drive for a less old drive and hope for the best
7. Make another fine vegetarian meal and hop on the couch for a stretch of movie watching  
   

 

 

 

Comfy Dog