Well,  my adventure with computer systems continues – and I am not sure who is winng. About a week after recovering the power supply in my disk array – failure.

Not just any failure – a complete lack of response, as in absolutely nothing. Except for power lights, there was nothing to tell me it was even turned on. Yes, that monster of failures – the motherboard.

So..off the local computer store, which for me is tigerdirect.ca.  I like their prices and they tend to carry a little more than the standard consumer fair.   I picked up a replacement for my old motherboard, which was manufactured by ASUS. I also picked up a new quad-core CPU.  I can rebuild it, faster, stronger, better than it was before.

So, home I went with my replacement motherboard and proceeded to replace the motherboard in my unit. This, unfortunately, was a bit of a disaster and a lot harder than I expected – even with a technical background.  It did not go well, particularly the little tiny pin connectors and my no longer young eyes. Eventually, I got everything together and connected correctly, but now my system would power up, then power down, then power up.

Back to the store, where I discover from the service tech they have sen this three times already and he no longer likes ASUS (neither do I). Great.

Lesson 1: Do NOT presume that the reliable vendor you purchased last time is still a reliable vendor now – ask questions.

Lesson 2: Ask questions of the repair techs about the brand they prefer – not the sales person.

The service tech recommended a Gigabyte motherboard (I have since discovered that this is the motherboard used by Google for all their servers – I’m sticking with them for now on, or at least until Lesson 1 kicks in again).  They were willing to replace it, but I had to do this myself. Although I started doing this in the store with my little leatherman tool, I quickly decided to pay them to do it.

Lesson 3: Pay someone to do work if the cost of the work is less than the cost of your time to do it.

This turned out to be a very good idea, as there was some less than perfect results form work the previous night that he corrected.

The system booted, but he didn’t reload the OS drivers, as that was another charge and I decided to save money. I really, really need to get the hang of lesson 3.

Well, it turns out that I had trouble find my old copy of the OS. It was actually only service pack 2, then I had to track down the code and when it booted:

Hal.dll corrupted or missing

No idea what this means, never seen this message before.  After a LOT of wailing around, I decided that I needed to reinstall the OS (can you see lesson 3 coming again). Yes, after re-installing the OS and blowing away my old configuration. I discovered this was due to the second drive in my system trying to boot up. Had I unplugged it, everything would have been fine <sigh>. Welcome to Lesson 3 (again).

Wait! I have backups of my C: drive. I had trialed both shadow protect and vmware to see which one I liked and still had the files from each one.

No joy, my 136GB of shadow protect backup we corrupted and unusable, which wasted several days.

After re-installing everything, I was unable to get my external SATA unit to work. After a LOT of work, I discovered that the SATA card cannot go next to the graphics card or the system cannot see it.

So, I’ve pulled my SATA unit and considering replacing it with something else like a DROBO. I’ve not raided the drives, but I am backing them up overnight in the mean time.

- I’ve install some 720o RPN 1TB drives that give me better response than my old SATA unit (who knew)

- My office is a LOT quieter and cooler as I discovered my old SATA unit was generating a lot of both.

Next time, I pop the hood of the desktop, I am going to pay someone else to deal with it……