The Post-Halloween Blues
So, one post for all of October. Yikes. My schedule, combined with my signature apathy, appears to have overtaken my desire to keep this place in order. No matter, we'll see if I can't do a little better this month.
My second-favorite holiday of the year has come and gone. Our home was decked out in all manner of amazing decorations. I had a fog machine. We had a keg. There were people in costume, loud music and much laugther. I paid the price on Sunday, but it was so worth it.
Last night, on Halloween proper, we were visited by a handful of trick-or-treaters. It came time to run out for dinner and we decided to leave the candy bowl on the front steps with a nice sign reading "Happy Halloween! Take a piece or two of candy." I believe there was even a smiley face. Yet when we came back from procuring our wonderfully greasy chicken dinners (literally fifteen minutes later), we were wiped out. We were out of candy at that point (save a few bite-sized Twix that Jessi had thoughtfully rescued from the bowl before we put it out...they're my favorite), so we had to take the delightful little ghost (which our apartment complex handed out to help trick-or-treaters determine which homes would welcome them) off the front door, douse the brightly-lit decorations on the front lawn and go inside. The little bastards ruined it for everyone.
It was to be expected, really. But it was still disappointing.
I inherited a new computer to replace the venerable Atlas as the file server at Casa Jessi y Sam. It's a simple used white box, nothing fancy or new. A midtower case with a cheap 250W power supply, some VIA-based S370 motherboard, a 1GHz Celeron, 128MB of PC100, CD-ROM and floppy drives. I was modestly disappointed that the MATX motherboard had only two DIMM slots, reducing the amount of RAM I can cram into the thing. It came with a single stick of 128MB and Atlas itself has a single stick of 128MB PC100, so I guess I'll just toss the old memory into the new box and call it a day. I was hoping I could utilize some addition DIMMs I had sitting around, but such is life. A 1GHz processor with 256MB of memory running Win2K ought to be more than adequate for our modest needs.
Last night, after Jessi and I had our disappointing experience with the marauding trick-or-treaters, finished our chicken and watched Extras, I set about preparing Atlas' hard disk for transplant into the new system. I cracked open the new machine (which I've dubbed Titan) to find one of the most wonderfully clean systems I've ever had the pleasure of working with (among used systems, anyway). Cables nice and neat, no dust, nothing. It was quite pleasant! In any case, after checking out the goods on Titan (and being both disappointed at the lack of abundant DIMM slots and being unable to identify the motherboard manufacturer), I closed 'er up and sat down at my desktop. I VNC'd into Atlas and began uninstalling device drivers in preparation for the move. Being slightly retarded, one of the first things I uninstalled was the driver for the network adapter. D'oh. Being unafraid of the dreaded IBD, I shut down Atlas and started the transplant.
After hassling with Atlas' unfriendly Gateway-designed case and dusty interior, I wrangled loose the hard disk and DIMM that I would need for the operation. I put the now-dead carcass of the machine into the closet, never to be used again (or so I'd hoped). I popped the DIMM into Titan, installed the hard drive and plugged my new file server into the monitor, keyboard and mouse on my workbench. It came up and posted fine, although I still couldn't tell much about the motherboard from the BIOS information.
Upon booting into Windows 2000, I am immediately greeted with...you guessed it. "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE, RETARD" (okay, it didn't call me a retard...but it might as well have). I attempted to boot into Safe Mode. No dice. So I hauled out the once-retired Atlas replaced the memory and hard disk and booted it up for one last time to finish removing device drivers. After completing that task and reinstalling the memory and disk into Titan, I was again greeted with the IBD stop message. At that point I surrendered for the evening. It was 9:30PM, and I wanted to get in a game of CoD with Jessi before bedtime. Tonight, I shall try Safe Mode. Should that fail, I will install a new hard disk, install Win2K and install the old hard disk as a slave, move the data over and call it a night.
Ho-ly crap.
There's not much else to report at the moment. Work continues as usual. More people are jumping ship, one of which was a key systems guy for my team. That was a big hit, but he went over to IOT and assures me that I won't have any trouble getting a position over there when the time comes for consolidation. Unless he's just blowing smoke up my skirt, that's good news.
I don't really have any political rantings at the moment, except that you can consider this a continuation of my "Everything's fscked up we have to fix it soooooooon!" cry of warning.
There are a few new pictures up in the gallery since the last time I posted, including some I salvaged off the SAN here at work from our Groupwise-to-Exchange migration back in May. You know, just in case you wanted to know what my office looks like o_O
Yeah. So have a nice Tuesday everyone. I'm going to make a frozen pizza and watch me a little Revenge of the Sith tonight.
-Sam
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