All day Monday was insane. With a lack of sleep, I was fiddling around with the server, trying to figure out why the damn thing is reporting a STOP error. I was working with Grant from EDS to determine our next course of action, and we had attempted to install over top of the recovery directory of WinNT, but setup insisted that the entire drive was either corrupted or unformatted, and wanted to format it before continuing. Of course, this was not what we wanted to do, since doing so would put us up the creek if the system board we ordered fixed the problem. However, since the system board didn’t arrive at the airport cargo as we had hoped, Grant’s duty manager suggested at the last minute to go ahead and format the drive to get the recovery directory back in there. So, there I was, at midnight, working with Grant until 4:00 to reinstall everything. Things would have went a lot faster if setup didn’t decide to freaking chkdsk the damn 170 GB RAID-5!!! Loud angry expletive!!!
Oh, well, what’s done was done. The install was successful, we configured the server, and then we restored the entire partition from the tape backups. The server booted perfectly, and all the services started up properly. I got outta there before I could be assigned permanent residency.
Today, I was still low on sleep due to our late night antics, and I spent most of the day catching up on paperwork, finishing up an old call, and tracking down that damn system board. I finally got it at the end of the day – turns out they left it back in the terminal and forgot to bring it to cargo. Damn it.
So, here I am back at work. I swapped the system board and had a little hiccup, but the server booted fine. The NEW problem we ran into (oh, you KNOW there’s always a new problem) is that the HP Navigator CD utility isn’t booting. We tested NT, the server boots fine and all the services still start, so there’s nothing wrong with the new system board, but something is off for a minor thing like this to happen. I ran a memory test, so no problems there. I don’t think I’m going home early tonight.
Current Music: SONIN – Tsugaru Kaikyou No Onna
Ain’t life grand?
You know what is funny??? I had one of these servers (actually an LH3) that I bought for $100. I upgraded all the firmware since 2000 was unhappy with it, and then finally decided to format it and set it up as an OpenBSD server. A kid at school really drooled over my conversations about this server, so I offerred to sell it to him for $250 and he took it. LOL