BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2004
Summer Migration
By Jerry Pournelle
June 20, 2004
(Summer Migration
: Page 1 of 1 )
Column 287 (Continued from the Previous Week)
Insanity
Now for Anastasia, the D875PBZ I'd tried to put the Drive of Doom into in the first place. When last seen she wouldn't boot even though all traces of Principessa's drive had been removed. Well, not quite all: There was a data cable plugged into the primary IDE controller slot, but it wasn't connected to anything. I removed that, put the case back together, and sadly put Anastasia aside.
It seemed a pity: That 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 with a gigabyte of dual channel RAM, a good Antec 400 Watt power supply, and a sturdy Antec server case with three fans (but still very quiet) was just right to be the new communications machine.
Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome: This Time For Sure! Knowing that, I noted that I had put Anastasia on a work table supplied with keyboard, mouse, Ethernet, speakers, and monitor, and, laughing at myself as I did it, I connected her up. Turned her on. Saw I was in the BIOS, which I had been unable to get to from the moment I installed the Doom Drive no matter that the Drive was gone; set her to boot from the RAID; exited the BIOS and moved the jumper (Intel motherboards have a jumper you move to make BIOS changes)—and e voila! Anastasia was back up and running just fine.
She still is. No hitches, no problems, not with her, not with any machines. The Mac connects to Anastasia and she to the Mac with no problems whatever. It's as if a flight of gremlins passed through then went on their way.
Now I suppose that adding an IDE drive with an OS on it somehow confused the BIOS so that it wouldn't boot from the Serial ATA RAID; but why it stayed confused and wouldn't let me get into the BIOS after that drive was removed is baffling. I am guessing that the data cable put just enough load onto the primary IDE controller to keep the machine confused, and removing that was good enough. This seems absurd, but it's the only thing I can think of.
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