ToTo, were's not in Kansas anymore!
By Ray Stankewitz

This is a sad tale-alas, I was forced to install a new motherboard in the 'puter that I use to do this site. you would think that after being a webmaster for over 10 years that I would observe safe computing, but NO...I didn't. Here's the sordid tale of what happened.

I should have known that there was a problem with my computer by the way it was acting. Occasionally the system would have problems accessing the Zip 250 drive and the D:\ drive (that's the drive that Linux resided on). There were other problems too. I guess I should back up a bit and describe the system. It was a P4-2.66ghz on an ABIT BE-7Raid board. The Hdd's were attached to the on-board Raid (HighPoint 372 but raid turned off) due to the other drives: DVD-Rom, CD-RW, DVD-RW and Zip250. The Raid was also ATA133 so the access would be faster. I had Win98se on the C drive and Fedora core3 on the D drive.

OK, so where did I store all my data, you ask? On the respective drives with the OS's, silly! Yup, that was a mistake. Big time mistake. What happened was this-first I couldn't get the boot manager (GRUB) to boot anything. Thinking that reinstalling GRUB would fix the problem, I discovered that I couldn't boot anything from a floppy. I then disconnected almost all the drives and used just a CD-Rom and the C:\ drive on 1 ide channel. OK, it (win98se) would boot after I restored the boot manager. I then had to try to save anything from the drive that I wanted. With the on-board raid dead, this was a problem. I added a DVD-RW drive to the mix, almost not booting in the process. I began to copy stuff to DVD-R media when the OS died! OK, I tried to do a reinstall in plce and that didn't work! 8-P

I was then forced to make a few decisions. The drive that had Fedora Core 3 got formatted to FAT-32. This would become storage. I then used a "Live distibution" on CD of Knoppix to access the dead C:\ drive and copy the data to the other drive. Once that was done, I used the Knoppix to format the drive and prepare it for WinXP Pro (no more Win98se this time)

I then ordered a new ECS motherboard that was compatible with my componenets. OK, so I could have gotten the latest and greatest but I had a good processor and 2 sticks (1 Gb) of matched Corsair ram that I just couldn't throw out. I still needed an add-in card to have more than 2 IDE channels so I used a Promise ATA133 card. All is well now and I think that the system is better than before. Now the C:\ drive has the OS and programs on it and the D:\ drive has the data! Not easy to mess up this time!! The only bummer this time is no Linux. 8-(

I hope that you may have gotten something out of this and that it didn't go over your head. If it did, please e-mail me and I will try to straighten the info our for you.

email me at ray(*REMOVETHIS*)stankewitz(*THE AT SIGN*)operamail(*USE A DOT HERE*)com

(let's see the spambots parse that!)