Computer progress... sort of.

Well, it took a little longer than I had hoped to get the storage server up and running.

After figuring out what parts I probably needed (I assumed the CPU was OK, and that the motherboard was fried), I placed an online order with my favorite vendor. Only thing is, after three days, I got a return e-mail saying that they'd cancelled my order, and that I should go back online, check my address and re-order.

Well, after checking, I discovered that the address was correct, but that the vendor had misrouted the package... It was supposed to go via US Postal Service, since we are in Belgium with the US Army, and have an APO address. Unfortunately, they put the right address onto the package but delivered it to Fedex for shipment. And since Fedex doesn't serve APO addresses, it was promptly rejected.

Another three days of e-mail exchanges took place, and I was pretty steamed (though I tried really hard to be civil and polite with my correspondence) about the whole thing. In the end, though, the vendor realized their error and reshipped the order with a significant discount for my time and trouble. And so, unless they make a habit of messing up my orders, I will keep this company as a favorite online vendor... most out there would either blow me off entirely and would definitely not try to compensate me for my time and trouble. These folks have made it into my A-List of preferred on-line vendors (and that list is pretty small... B&H Photo, Amazon, and now NewEgg).

Well, the parts arrived on Monday, and I was happy to get started on the repairs (which took most of Tuesday, as it turned out). I got the motherboard installed, then plugged in the CPU, Memory, and Hard Drives, and Voila! The beast came alive! But then disappointment....

First, it would never get beyond the POST... it kept rebooting as soon as it accessed the hard drive for starting Windows. Then I changed a couple of BIOS settings and it would begin to start windows, but then halt and would not continue even in so-called "safe" mode. Then I went to reinstall the operating system (as a "repair" reinstallatio) but it still would hang and not finish booting.

Then I did a complete "so-called clean" install of windows over the old copy. There wasn't much there to lose, so not a big deal. Unfortunately, even that wouldn't work. It would get about half-way through the installation and would suddenly quit on an error, with a message that it couldn't find some network resource that it needed.

In the end, I had to completely reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows from scratch. And that finally worked. Of course, then I ran into Microsoft's "activation buzzsaw." In their efforts to frustrate legal users (the pirates know how to get around the safeguards), every copy of Windows XP has to be activated. Normally, if you have an internet connection and it's the first time you activate, this is no problem. If you try to activate the product on two different machines, it won't let you, and you've got to place a call to Microsoft to get a new activation code.

And, again, if it's been a long time since you last activated, you can probably do the reactivation over their automated telephone system. Unfortunately, I knew from past experience that this would require dealing with a real person, since it was only a few weeks since the initial activation and the activation program/procedure would recognize the changed motherboard as a different computer. But still, I had to go through the entire automated system, recite to a voice-recognition program the 54-or-so digit installation code, get rejected, and then finally get handed over to a real person to whom I had to explain about the little problem with the thunderstorm a few weeks back and to promise that I wasn't trying to install this copy of Windows on more than one computer.

Phweeeew! It finally worked!

Then was the problem of getting my backup storage running... I'd been unable to find a satisfactory motherboard that supported mirrored hard drives (where the two drives are always exact copies of one-another... easy and powerful for backing stuff up), so I'd found a suitable drive controller to use and ordered that with the new motherboard. My next chore was to install the drive controller and get the backups running.

Well, wouldn't you know it! In my haste, I managed to order the wrong drive controller card. Entirely my mistake, too! So for the moment, I can add a bunch of hard drives to the computer, and I can get to a bunch of precious data on those drives, but can't do the mirrored backups. So I need to order a new RAID controller. I hope that this will go smoothly.

And the bottom line... the new computer is running, but still not doing quite what I wanted it to.