Well we had a jolly time getting the new drive to work in phantom. If you're not in the mood for a story (with hopefully some useful pointers), skip to the end.
It was a pleasant and peaceful March afternoon today when Evan, Stuart, and I entered The Closet. Phantom awaited us patiently. After a few minutes we remembered how to get minicom talking to the serial port and we logged in and halted our good friend. Alas by this time we had bored Stuart to tears and he didn't get to see the serial �berleet action. We installed the drive (note to future admins, we disconnected the CDROM) and turned phantom on. After a few beeps and burps, absolutely nothing happened. Thanks to the brilliant PC design, we had to dig up a monitor after all due to the BIOS not grokking our new drive. The BIOS was in fact too old to handle a large drive, as we confirmed upon plugging in the monitor in the corner. What next? Why, the natural thing would be to throw our hands up and give up, but Andrew and co. were relying on us so we interrupted the hard-working web developers nearby and looked for BIOS upgrades. Oops, they want to charge us for a BIOS upgrade to a 1998 BIOS. Right. Then I remembered that in my hand-me-down past I had trouble with hard drives too big for my mobo (we're talking single-digit gigs, then), and that if I just let the BIOS ignore it linux was able to use them just fine. As long as I didn't have to boot from that drive I was ok. We got about halfway through the startup, had already seen the kernel recognize hda properly, and things just stopped. A few reboots later we had the serial port hooked up again coincidentally and noticed that it was having a hard time checking /dev/sda1 (note: when you boot with serial console options not everything shows up on the monitor). Oops, the new kernel uses devfs (the old kernel needed an upgrade for security reasons) and devfsd wasn't installed. Back to the old kernel, apt-get install devfsd, reboot. Now the kernel doesn't see the drive. Note: jumpers matter. Only IDE drive = no jumper (or Cable Select). Phantom is presently rsyncing mirrors, and when it's done we'll let you know just what's available. Don't get trigger happy and start downloading anything yet, you'll just slow it down, and whatever you're thinking about downloading probably isn't fully there yet so you'd be wasting your time. Many thanks again to the people who have made this mirroring HDD a reality! -- .O. Hans Fugal | De gustibus non disputandum est. ..O http://hans.fugal.net | Debian, vim, mutt, ruby, text, gpg OOO | WindowMaker, gaim, UTF-8, RISC, JS Bach --------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG Fingerprint: 6940 87C5 6610 567F 1E95 CB5E FC98 E8CD E0AA D460 ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
