New hard drive up and working
My shiny new 250GB hard drive arrived from Newegg on the last afternoon of 2006, along with a shinier box of DVD-Rs and an even shinier IDE cable, so I welcomed the new year installing the new hardware on my three-year-old home computer.
It went quite smoothly at first. I decided to replace the old 80GB hard drive rather than adding the new one (as the case apparently isn't designed for two hard drives, not to mention possible power supply troubles), so I booted into linux, connected the new hard drive using the IDE-USB adaptor, fdisk'd it, and dd'd whole partitions (two FAT32 for Windows and two ext3 for linux) from the old drive to the new one. I thought I could avoid reinstalling the system in this way, and indeed this worked without a hitch. Of course, I was careful to keep partition sizes (mostly) unchanged, and remembered to unmount most filesystems before the dd. I was unable to unmount (or read-only remount) root though, but I checked all filesystems afterwards, and they were all okay.
Then I tried to install GRUB on the new drive. grub-install complained, of course, because it didn't know what /dev/sda would become, so I tricked it by modifying device.map--which, as it happened, would not work.
I thought the new hard drive would be bootable by then, but I knew of no way to be sure, so I just rebooted into Windows, formatted the new partitions and made sure that they are recognized.
Now it was time to actually install the hard drive into the computer, along with the
DVD burner that had spent almost a year on the USB-IDE adaptor due to the laziness of its owner. It was not that easy, and took about two hours, but with dear Papa around there was hardly anything hardware-related that couldn't be solved :)
And finally we closed the case, plugged everything in, and at 1am, January 1st I pressed the power button. It booted up quite normally, until the pesky GRUB tried to load and--
* * *
It died with "Error 17".
"Well, as there seems to be nothing wrong with the hardware, it's time to say good night." said Papa.
"All right. I'll find a bootable CD to fix this problem."
But everything went amok in the next half-hour. The CD I was referring to was a Ubuntu live CD that someone gave me a year ago, but I looked everywhere and could not find it. I tried my luck with a fairly old KnoWIMS CD (which was Knoppix plus some educational software called WIMS), but after changing the BIOS settings to boot from the CD, the machine didn't properly reboot. The screen simply went black.
I pressed the power button for ten seconds. The machine rebooted(!), but the screen was still black.
I turned off the computer and turned it on again. The screen was still black.
I turned it off again, disconnected and reconnected the power, and turned it on again. It booted, but locked up just after uncompressing the linux kernel.
I tried yet again, and this time the screen was totally black. I could only heard one long beep and two short beeps.
I tried a few more times. The same three beeps. I found in a hardware book nearby that this might mean that the graphics card went wrong.
Could it be that the integrated graphics chip on my i845G motherboard really died? After all, the graphics chip did lock up occasionally ever since the machine was first bought. And considering that the integrated Ethernet chip had stopped working a few days ago as well (I did have another network card plugged in, so that didn't disconnect me), maybe it was my motherboard that was dying? Oh, that would be baaaad!
* * *
But bad luck went just as quickly as it had came. When I tried yet again one minute later, the system booted up successfully from the KnoWIMS CD. Despite my worries it didn't lock up when going to graphics mode, and everything seemed to be normal. The software on the CD turned out to be new enough, so I grub-install'd again, and rebooted. Everything went fine. Linux booted--Windows XP booted (as if it was unaware that it had been moved to a new system)--even the integrated network was working again--and even the earthquake-crippled Internet seemed to be much better than before!
The moral of the story: the behavior of computer hardware is not for mere mortals to fully understand. I suppose I am among the most computer-savvy 1% of the population, yet I still feel so helpless when something goes wrong. Apparently, it is best to do some good deeds, particularly before installing new hardware, and hope that whatever divine figure that controls luck hears about the Good Things you have done...
* * *
That was not the only thing happened on the New Year's Eve, though. Of course, there was still network troubles, with at least 70% of the messages in MSN getting bounced back (if I can log on at all), making conversation an extremely frustrating process. And there was another thing that I could not find anywhere besides the Ubuntu CD--one of the Qin Wenjun's books that I got only two weeks ago and had barely began to read! How could I have lost it?
Maybe I should feel thankful that I hadn't lost something important. After all, it was only a book that I can still buy (and at a discounted price, even), and a CD that I can burn myself at any time. As for the network problem, it is lucky to be able to connect to foreign sites at all--not that I am disconnected entirely from foreign sites anyway--and it will get fixed in one month, at most.
It went quite smoothly at first. I decided to replace the old 80GB hard drive rather than adding the new one (as the case apparently isn't designed for two hard drives, not to mention possible power supply troubles), so I booted into linux, connected the new hard drive using the IDE-USB adaptor, fdisk'd it, and dd'd whole partitions (two FAT32 for Windows and two ext3 for linux) from the old drive to the new one. I thought I could avoid reinstalling the system in this way, and indeed this worked without a hitch. Of course, I was careful to keep partition sizes (mostly) unchanged, and remembered to unmount most filesystems before the dd. I was unable to unmount (or read-only remount) root though, but I checked all filesystems afterwards, and they were all okay.
Then I tried to install GRUB on the new drive. grub-install complained, of course, because it didn't know what /dev/sda would become, so I tricked it by modifying device.map--which, as it happened, would not work.
I thought the new hard drive would be bootable by then, but I knew of no way to be sure, so I just rebooted into Windows, formatted the new partitions and made sure that they are recognized.
Now it was time to actually install the hard drive into the computer, along with the
DVD burner that had spent almost a year on the USB-IDE adaptor due to the laziness of its owner. It was not that easy, and took about two hours, but with dear Papa around there was hardly anything hardware-related that couldn't be solved :)
And finally we closed the case, plugged everything in, and at 1am, January 1st I pressed the power button. It booted up quite normally, until the pesky GRUB tried to load and--
* * *
It died with "Error 17".
"Well, as there seems to be nothing wrong with the hardware, it's time to say good night." said Papa.
"All right. I'll find a bootable CD to fix this problem."
But everything went amok in the next half-hour. The CD I was referring to was a Ubuntu live CD that someone gave me a year ago, but I looked everywhere and could not find it. I tried my luck with a fairly old KnoWIMS CD (which was Knoppix plus some educational software called WIMS), but after changing the BIOS settings to boot from the CD, the machine didn't properly reboot. The screen simply went black.
I pressed the power button for ten seconds. The machine rebooted(!), but the screen was still black.
I turned off the computer and turned it on again. The screen was still black.
I turned it off again, disconnected and reconnected the power, and turned it on again. It booted, but locked up just after uncompressing the linux kernel.
I tried yet again, and this time the screen was totally black. I could only heard one long beep and two short beeps.
I tried a few more times. The same three beeps. I found in a hardware book nearby that this might mean that the graphics card went wrong.
Could it be that the integrated graphics chip on my i845G motherboard really died? After all, the graphics chip did lock up occasionally ever since the machine was first bought. And considering that the integrated Ethernet chip had stopped working a few days ago as well (I did have another network card plugged in, so that didn't disconnect me), maybe it was my motherboard that was dying? Oh, that would be baaaad!
* * *
But bad luck went just as quickly as it had came. When I tried yet again one minute later, the system booted up successfully from the KnoWIMS CD. Despite my worries it didn't lock up when going to graphics mode, and everything seemed to be normal. The software on the CD turned out to be new enough, so I grub-install'd again, and rebooted. Everything went fine. Linux booted--Windows XP booted (as if it was unaware that it had been moved to a new system)--even the integrated network was working again--and even the earthquake-crippled Internet seemed to be much better than before!
The moral of the story: the behavior of computer hardware is not for mere mortals to fully understand. I suppose I am among the most computer-savvy 1% of the population, yet I still feel so helpless when something goes wrong. Apparently, it is best to do some good deeds, particularly before installing new hardware, and hope that whatever divine figure that controls luck hears about the Good Things you have done...
* * *
That was not the only thing happened on the New Year's Eve, though. Of course, there was still network troubles, with at least 70% of the messages in MSN getting bounced back (if I can log on at all), making conversation an extremely frustrating process. And there was another thing that I could not find anywhere besides the Ubuntu CD--one of the Qin Wenjun's books that I got only two weeks ago and had barely began to read! How could I have lost it?
Maybe I should feel thankful that I hadn't lost something important. After all, it was only a book that I can still buy (and at a discounted price, even), and a CD that I can burn myself at any time. As for the network problem, it is lucky to be able to connect to foreign sites at all--not that I am disconnected entirely from foreign sites anyway--and it will get fixed in one month, at most.