Having to type this again, seeing how Blogger is being fucking shit this morning. But my hunch about the drive overheating was completely and utterly 125% correct. I took the drive out of the case, and connected it up loose…

It’s working fine. I inadvertantly left the machine on overnight (crashed out on the sofa AGAIN) and not a single click from it. I even did the ultimate in hard drive thrashings… a defrag. Not a peep. Hurrah!

Now, seeing as the drive still works, I’m going to reverse the roles of the two drives… the 200Gb drive was originally purchased for video editing. In hindsight, it was a bit of overkill, so I’m going to use that drive as my main one, and the 160Gb drive as a video editing drive - when I’m not doing any editing, it’ll simply be a case of removing the drive.

There’s something heart-stopping about formatting a 160Gb drive though :)

All data moved from the knackered 160Gb drive, to the new one. Swapped the drive letters, and everything is working fine.

Or rather, is slowly dying like a monkey with a stab wound. It’s been making “click-clonk” noises for about a week. But they’re becoming more frequent, to the point where it’s just not worth keeping the drive in there anymore. My initial suspicion is overheating, as the space for the drive is stupidly cramped. First, there’s the 60Gb drive, followed by the floppy drive, and then the 160Gb drive underneath that.

I’m moving everything to the 200Gb drive, and I’ll set that up as being the main drive. I might dick around with the drives later, and see how it runs either out of the case, or with the floppy drive taken out, to allow a little bit of air to circulate.

I’m guessing it’ll help, because for the last few days, when the clicking gets really bad, I’ve wafted some fresh air inside the case, and that seems to fix it for a bit.

I’ve got the Seagate diagnostic thing downloaded, so I’ll give that a whirl once it’s finished

Complete software reinstall of George, currently serving as the Windowcam PC

Reason was that under Win ME, Tight VNC kept crashing

Ditched redundant Linux partition, drive is now entirely NTFS

Model number of network cards in there is DFE 528 TX. When going to the US D-Link site, it won’t pick up drivers. It’s only on the UK site.

Chipset is RTL 8139 so it’s piss easy to find drivers anyway.

George does have a problem though. Something’s loose. If the machine is moved, it’ll lock up totally (no mouse/keyboard movement)

Not a problem now, but something to note if it does fuck up in the future

Suspect video card to be honest

Technorati Tags: complog, computer, faulty, george, reinstall

It’s about time I recorded every change I make to my machines. If you’re reading this, it’s not going to be truly exciting.

Last few days…

George developed a fault where it would just freeze after about 1 minute. Wouldn’t even install Win2000.

RAM was fine. Tried a brand new stick. Freezing still occuring. Installed WinME. Machine now booted but froze after 5 minutes.

Reinstalled Linux (SuSE 9.0) on a dual boot system. Installed fine. But that would freeze too, after roughly the same time, no matter if you were doing anything or not.

Two different OS’s. 5 different sticks of memory. Decided that it wasn’t worth troubleshooting, and that the motherboard must be shot.

Replaced Mobo and processor, working fine.

Technorati Tags: complog