The Meltdown
Yesterday's meltdown didn't go especially well. The Intel D865PERLK motherboard needs a slew of drivers for its chipset, but the drivers wouldn't install, the disk formatted weirdly, and I'm beginning to think that something, somewhere, messed up the 137 GB barrier fix that I applied last April when I put the system together.
Some of you may know that there's an ATA disk interface (both parallel and serial) limitation of 28 bits for addressing hard drive logical blocks, and while that may have seemed like a lot of logical blocks 10 years ago, we're way past that point now. What this means is that using hard disk drives with greater than 137 GB capacity takes some care and some screwing around. I used a 200 GB drive for the bootable drive in my system, and in looking back I think that that was a mistake. I don't store data on my C: drive unless forced to, so even a partition as small as 40 GB will take a long time to fill.
There's a nice white paper on the topic from Seagate here. Ultimately I'm going to have to use Seagate's bootable formatter disc to reformat the whole 200 GB drive, but given that all but 25 GB or so were empty air, I've decided to duck the issue and install a 120 GB SATA drive instead. That will still give me three chunky boot partitions and (one would hope) fewer inexplicable failures. More as I learn it.
In the meantime, I moved my data back into the 1.7 GHz Dell Xeon box that I bought in 2002 and will be using that for my main system for awhile. It's a little noisy, but quite fast since I filled it with RAMBUS memory a few months back. I still have a few apps to install, but it's most of the way to where it should be.
There are times when I think I should have been a farmer instead.