Tale of Woe

[Charles Rishel]

Hey gang,

Would like to share a little (ok, not so little) story, and ask for a bit 
of help from the group.
Here I am on a Friday night (Wednesday to the 'normal' world) and have my 
server still making sick sounds due to a fan that is dying quickly.  Also 
have great plans to install a shiny new 40GB HD to replace the nearly full 
20GB hd in the server, so I get a 'great' idea.. let's take server down for 
a short while, replace power supply, as I think this is where my ailing fan 
lives.  And while we are at it we will put this nice new hd in and get it 
up and running and transfer data from running hd over to the new hd.. swap 
drives and test that server still comes up normally.  Doesn't sound too 
unreasonable, right?

Ok, so now we have replaced p/s and put new hd as sec/slave.. cdrom is 
sec/master, orig hd is still pri/master.  We boot up system, go into BIOS, 
lo and behold, there is NO sec/slave drive.. just hangs BIOS.  So we hop 
back on workstation, go out to www.fic.com.tw to see if there is an upgrade 
that will allow this fine m/b (FIC PA2013) to see new hd.  There is, so we 
download flash utility and make boot disk so that we can flash the BIOS, 
not something I like to do on a normal basis, but desperate times call for 
desperate measures.

So, we flash BIOS, while hearing the ailing fan start whining again, now 
I'm getting agitated, but continue on nonetheless.
BIOS flash seems to go without a hitch, we reboot, and voila, there is now 
a 40GB hd on sec/slave.  Ok we tell ourself, we are now in good shape.  So 
we make sure our BIOS is setup fine, and during one of the shutdown 
periods, we replace cpu fan.. no more whining, hey we are looking REAL good 
now.

Ok, now we have new hd recognized, and no more whining, figure we are in 
the home stretch here, this is where we trip on some bad juju, reboot 
server, still running RH6.2 on it (I know,upgrade, but it has been running 
faithfully for over 2 years, if it ain't broke ya know).. and we are 
booting, and see disturbing news, #1 Linux does not see our new hd at all, 
and #2 gives me squaks about cdrom being open, which it is not.  So, I 
fiddle around with jumpers, and just put hd on sec/master, no cdrom.  Now 
Linux sees new hd, but only see's it as an 8GB hd, and states funky stuff 
about type of drive, and also states 'bad magic 0000000', so, here we are 
with 32GB of wasted space, and bad magic running around.  Turds!!!

So, as a test, as I think maybe this old decrepit version of Linux will not 
see the full HD, so we do more testing.  We now set new hd as pri/master, 
put cdrom back on sec/master, throw in a 7.1 install disc, play with BIOS 
again, and boot from cdrom, voila we now see a 40GB hd as hda.  Ok, so I 
have successfully gotten to the root of my evils so to speak, and figure I 
have gone far enough for one night (it is now 7:30AM, we get home @ 1:30AM 
from work) so I figure, pull new hd out for now, set system back up as it 
was, and will decide what new distro to load after a short nap.  Here is 
where all of the bad juju catches up to me.  Have reset everything back to 
original state, except for ailing/whining fan, boot up and only get 
LI.  AARRGGHHHH!!!!

Ok, not so bad I tell myself, we do have a boot disk :-)  so I dutifully 
put in boot disk, get system back up and running, figure running 'lilo' 
again will set the MBR back to good proper order.  Reboot sytem w/out boot 
disk, no go.. still only getting LI.  No matter what I do, I have even 
reformatted the MBR, rebooted, reran lilo, and still it will not go into 
second stage install.

Does anyone have ANY suggestions, aside from a quarter pound of C4, a 10 
minute timer, and a short trip to the beer distributor???

Sorry about the length of this tale of woe, from a young man in Soutwestern NY.