The one where it comes alive!

"The Beast" has risen. It may be considered a geriatric recovery by most computer nerds, but I am ecstatic. This was quite the feat!

Monday night, I got a call from cousin Chad: "Wanna' LAN it up?" How do you turn down an offer like that? My first instinct was "Let me see if I can revive 'the beast.'"
As you may recall, my RAID array went haywire a few months ago. Over the passing time, I've slowly been trying to monkey with the box, here and there. I figured out my BIOS processor problem - BIOS thought it was an Athlon XP 1500... but the chip is an XP 1900. Change a few settings, and back in business. No more CPU check errors. And it seems as though the memory testing I've done indicates that the 3 1GB Crucial modules I have are all good. There were some indications to the contrary earlier on.

In addition, it seems as though only one of the 2 drives in the RAID array went south. I actually almost recovered it, but just has too many bad sectors... and is now making that fabulous seeking clunking sound.

I'm hoping that with the old installation of Windows on there it just had too many unorganized corruptions to keep track of, and eventually just went south. So far, I've had no blue screens in the setup tonight after getting home from date night with Christina in Kenosha.

So, anyway, last night was a long story. I can't express the frustration I was running into with my Windows installation. In a nutshell, the disk was corrupted. Chad was nice enough to hang a new disk on my door knob tonight for me. So, tonight, I went to town right away when I got in the door.

I pulled all the drives out and did some diagnostic scans. I pulled out my old 60GB Seagate Barracudas that used to be my RAID array in this machine when I first built it in summer of '02. 6 years is a pretty good run for a gaming rig. And, it seems as though it has some more life left in it.

So, I've finally learned my lesson. I setup a RAID 1 array, "mirrored," with the two Seagates. That's going to be my important files backup. I'll sync up my laptop to backup here on my network as well seeing as the Western Digital 250GB "my book" I bought for this purpose decided not to even power up on it's 3rd use in May. If you could have seen the steam pour out my ears as DJ S2H was preparing for a show. It's very difficult to pull songs from your library of 150GB of MP3s when the drive won't even turn on. Turns out, the early generation was rifled with crappy power supplies. With a little creative debugging with the help of Nate during my DJ gig, we were able to narrow down that the power supply was the problem, not the drive. So, I picked up a replacement supply on eBay for a bargain $6.99. Gotta love those mass qty Chinese suppliers. Upon inspection when it arrived, it seems like a pretty decent unit...for consumer grade stuff. I look forward to getting the drive going again...

Anyway, yeah, so the Seagates are going to be my "important" data for backup. It will actually be duplicate backup because of the RAID Mirrored array.

So, I also did some reorganizing. Moved some cards around (to redistribute PCI bus loading), pulled out the dead drive, added Seagates, removed an old CD-ROM, put a new TV tuner card in (from another computer), and cleaned out the dust bunnies - doesn't look like I cleaned from the pictures, but there was a 1/4 of dust layered throughout the case. I also rerouted some cables to help improve airflow. There are 4 case fans for this beast to help keep the drives cool... and the proc and video card, course.

So, why try so hard to resurrect this beast? Well, for one thing, I'm cheap. Hoping I don't have to invest in a new desktop for a while now. It seems there's another major financial obligation I'm saving for (hmmmmmm). That, and my laptop (while a thunderous gaming laptop in it's day of 2004), is horrifically slow. Laptops are all about comprimise. Here is a beautiful example...
I started a fresh install of Battlefield 2 on my emachines M6802 laptop last night at Chad's. It took 1hr 20 minutes to install the game off of 3 CDs. Following that, there is a major patch update over 500MB in size. The patch took an additional 2 1/2 hours. 3hrs 50mins total.
Tonight, I installed all 3 discs on "The Beast" in about 23 minutes while I've been typing up this post. The patch update is 50% complete or so, with a grand total of 13 minutes on the clock. Now, I'm sure a new gaming rig would smoke past these times, but you can see that this is a major improvement. Imagine the improvement in game play! We're looking at about 45 mins total for the Beast.

Well that said, here are a few pictures of it while I was screaming in the background... "It's.... aaa aaa -aaallliiiiiiiiiiivvvvvveee!!!! IT'S ALIIIVE!!! [Muuuuuuuwwwwwaaaaahahahahahaaaa]"