(OT) Worst night ever. WAS Adding a ide drive to an all scsi comp uter
Dear all,
Thank you for the advise on adding the ide drive to my computer. I could
not get the ide drive to even recognize. After some monkey-ing around, I
decided to pull all the drives out of my computer and add 5 brand new 36GB
10,000 RPM 80pin SCSI drives to my computer. I printed out the Software
RAID How-to, ordered a pizza, bought 4 cans of Mountain Dew from the soda
machine, and went to work...
That was 2.5 hours ago. Now here I am writing to you. You see I could go
home and tell my wife all that had happened but she would be half asleep and
just stare blankly. Even awake she could not begin to sympathize with me,
or even understand in the least what I am talking about. This is where you
all come in. Tonight, you will unwillingly lend me a sympathetic ear.
Now where was I? Oh yes, my new hard disks. About a month ago my boss
decided to order 10-15 (I lost count) of these hard drives. He did not read
the fine print and accidentally ordered 80pin hot swap drives. When life
gives you lemons, make lemonade right? I happened to have 5 80 pin to 68/50
pin SCSI converters lying around in the back and used those to connect these
hard disks to my back-plane-less computer. Geocentric (my beloved Debian
box) is a IBM Z-Pro with a Xeon 1Ghz (I could add a second processor), 1.5GB
of RAM, a dual head video card, etc; all housed in a 50,000lb case. Way too
much for what I use it for, but nice none-the-less. I haven't turned this
computer off in months. Stable as can be, even though I was running SID.
Btw, thanks to all Debian project people out there, I am constantly amazed
at how functional even the 'unstable' tree is! I think I'll get "Debian 4
Life" tattooed on me somewhere... Ok, I'm loosing focus. Geocentric has 6
or 7 slots that you can add drives to on these little rails that come with
the case. It took about an hour to figure out how to insert all of those
drives in such a way that they would all fit. But, I did it! I then had to
somehow cable these together, with the one cable I had to daisy chain them
all together. It was impossible. In a moment of "ah-ha" I carefully
removed two of the pressed on connectors to the ribbon cables, and then just
as carefully pressed them back on with the help of a vice and a micrometer.
With my newly customized cable I went back to work. After some twisting to
get the connectors oriented correctly with the SCA -> 68pin adapter, they
all snapped in perfectly. I would like to take a moment to add out of the 5
converters I had, I had three different brands, mismatched throughout the
chain. Finally getting the computer assembled I plugged it in... A smile on
my face... A 1 INCH SPARK ARCED FROM ONE OF THE CONVERTERS... Then... My
main board started to smoke. I unplugged my computer... Put it on a cart
and wheeled it to the back room.
I'm going to sleep now... tomorrows another day...
Michael
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