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I write things here.

The archive.

Not again.

Bag is packed, I’m 2 hours from being able to check-in online, seat is picked:I’M GOING TO NEW YORK!!!!!!! (again) This is getting slightly tiresome.

On another note, I had an (interesting to some, dull to others) experience with a new 300Gb hard disk, which I shall now relate, in order to keep up appearences that I’m much more of a geek than is actually true.

I bought a 300Gb hard disk. They’re quite cheap - about £114 from Dabs. Seeing as it’s SATA, I also decided I needed a SATA. So it turned up, I bought some long SATA cables as I have an odd case and the normal one wouldn’t reach, made sure the server kernel was compiled to know what the hell it was, was relieved to see that my power supply already had funny SATA power connectors and I didn’t need to buy any more, and plugged it in. Lilo complained about something, so I cursed for a bit and booted from a cd. The Gentoo 2005.0 LiveCD! crashed whilst doing a device autoconfigure. This, I thought, was odd, and probably very bad. After a little bit of head-scratching and passing 5 million arguments to the boot thing, telling it not to do the autoconfigure, I had it working.Seeing that lilo is bad and that grub is good, I deleted one and installed the other. After rebooting, everything was fine, except it didn’t see the new drive. It saw the controller, it didn’t see the drive. Thinking that the most frustrating thing would be buying something, waiting a week to put it in and finding it’s dead on a friday night 9 days before I’d see an open UK post office, I cursed some more. Then I went to bed.

In the morning, I decided to start anew, and turned it on. This time, it did something different. The BIOS found the card, loaded it’s BIOS, and then proceded to add the disk. So it wasn’t dead, it was just tired and needed a good night’s sleep. The problem was, the BIOS was adding the new disk as first in the queue, and the other 2 SCSI disks after that. This means when grub was told to look “on the second disk” for the kernel, it got confused, because the “second disk” was now the “third disk”. I put the cd back in and booted off that. The problem now was in the ordering of the disks. SATA and SCSI are both seen to be equivalent in the eyes of linux. Every disk also has a letter - a is the first etc. Everything that needs to talk to a physical disk talks to the right letter. If you put a new one in first, everything else gets shuffled up one, and you have to change everything that talks to a physical disk to point it at the next one in the queue, as the disk it was meant to talk to has now moved one down the queue. Anyway, I told grub to stop being stupid and to look on the third disk, and rebooted. It still said it had no idea what I was talking about. Turns out, for reasons completely unknown, that whilst the BIOS adds the new disk to the front of the queue, linux figures everything out, and rearranges it to how it was before.

Finally, I got it working. By hitting it with a stick. The main aim of all this was to tell of the torment of the process I had to go through to enable me to burn every dvd I own to my server, which means I can pick and choose to watch any dvd I want on anything in the house, without even touching the dvd itself. Useful.I hope everyone enjoyed that. :)