What a week!

I don’t have a lot of time to enter much, but I wanted to mention that this week has been... harrowing.

On Thursday, I went to upgrade a client’s Windows XP box with some faster hardware. After installing the hardware, the box would just reboot over and over and over. I’ve tried to avoid XP so this was news to me. I did a little research and quickly found out you have to run the recovery utilities on the XP CD to fix this. All I could find in my client’s cabinet was an XP Home CD, so I tried it. That didn’t help me. One person I called suggested just reinstalling over the top. I tried that, but had to leave for another appointment. While I was at that appointment, the client called me and said he found his XP Professional CDs. After my appointment, I went back and installed XP Professional over the top of XP Home. The resulting system was unstable, slow, and not usable.

So, I backed up the data and reformatted - which is what I should have done in the first place. After five hours or so, my client had a system he could use again and I had more conviction that Microsoft is a front for Satan.

Friday afternoon, a client with a Linux server we support called and explained that he had accidentally disconnected the power from the server while trying to figure out why the display monitor would not power up. After reconnecting the power, the server would not boot.

I sent Adam over to check it out and none of his preliminary attempts to fix it worked. The hard drives were connected to a serial ATA controller and it seemed like that controller wasn’t letting the BIOS know it contained devices that could boot.

Adam took the machine home and confirmed that the data was still safe on the drives. He did this using the Fedora CD rescue mode. He brought the machine to me on Saturday and I researched the problem, purchased a new SATA controller, and then determined if the BIOS could see the SATA controller before the SCSI controller (for the tape drive), it would boot from the SATA controller. Sure enough, that fixed the problem.

We’re not sure why it was booting before, but it should boot from now on since the BIOS will see the SATA controller first in the PCI scan.

Saturday was XMission’s big install fest. It was fun. Not as many people came as we had hoped, but we had a good crowd and we met some great people.

Saturday night was a Sons Of Nothing show in Nephi. I was pretty late getting there, which stressed Thom out. And then my computer responsible for playing video files was wigging out. I couldn’t get the videos to play to the S-Video port. Eventually, I figured out I couldn’t play any Matrox MJPEG AVI files, but I could play some MPEGs. I was able to display some video for the show, but some songs traditionally presented with great video were videoless.

I think I made for up for it by taking over the light board and putting on a kick-ass light show. :-)

So, here it is Sunday. I’m feeling wiped out and like I’m coming down with a sinus infection of some kind. I’m sure glad this last week is over with, though.