The new project, day 5
2006-04-24
Well, it works now. So far, my new/old Debian box is a DNS server for my internal namespace and Primary Domain Controller for a WinNT4-style domain. It wasn't all that easy to get there...
The story so far is lengthy, an epic tale of dashed hopes, heroic endeavours and triumph over adversity. Well, not that heroic, or epic, and I much prefer it when there's a decent romantic subplot in there somewhere, but still...
As you may recall, last Wednesday I had purchased a lovely new (reconditioned) hard drive, for a very reasonable price, and used it to revive my old Win98 machine (whose HDD was pretty much dead) and put Debian on it. I was suspicious that it only detected the first 137GB of the drive, but it was a cheap drive; 60GB that (I didn't need anyway) wasn't worth the hassle of sending it back.
On Day 2, I came home, turned both computers on. No DNS. I try to ask why: no SSH. I swap the monitor and keyboard over (I never bothered getting a KVM switch, because I only need it on one day every couple of years, but on that day I rue the decision to do without); the server hasn't booted. I look at the BIOS, which now thinks the drive is only 10GB.
I tried detecting it again, but the detection routine hung the computer. I deactivated the drive, but that stopped it being bootable, and subsequent attempts to turn it back to user-specified did their own little detection which hung the computer.
On Friday, I made one of my trademark stupid decisions. Bearing in mind that the drive was reconditioned (and hence prone to being a bit dodgy), I decided to send it back; I had 14 days of warranty (only 14! Bastards) and apparently under the Distance Selling Act (2000) I also had a 7-day cool-off on the transaction even if it wasn't faulty. Besides, I was impatient to get some work done on it over the weekend. So I bought an equivalent brand new drive.
Of course, got that home and it had the same problem. It's now looking like BIOS. I spoke to a knowledgeable friend who concurred, and I set to finding an update for the BIOS. There goes Friday evening: I suppose I was lucky to find it at all (we're talking about a motherboard that must be six or so years old) but I did eventually find it. The manufacturer had helpfully listed the boards by processor type, and by having an early PIII in the same socket as a PII had effectively hidden mine so that I doubted which it was. I eventually found a link to it on a forum (in French; Google is my friend). Although I was pleased to see that the update claimed to fix a known issue whereby the computer would hang trying to detect drives of more than 65GB. Hoorah!
Quite how I got it to work the first day, I don't know.
So, with that fixed, I've now got two 200GB drives, which of course I'm determined to keep both of: the one I could return was a very good deal after all, and sooner or later I'll be glad of it... Except that although each one now worked, it still only detected as 137GB; a quick look at the configuration showed that for the cylinders or sectors (or whatever; I never really worried about the physical construction of such things) it could only count to 65,500-odd (2^16-1, to be precise). Normally I'd hope the restriction was in the BIOS, but that wasn't going to help; I'd already flashed the BIOS to the last available version and the manufacturer seemed to have stopped work on it in 2000.
So began the next crazy project: take the two drives out of my Debian box and swap them with the two drives in my Windows one. Sounds simple, huh? And yes, I suppose it is, but it's just as well I only had 120GB of data on my 600GB total storage. I stuck one of the 200GB drives in with the WinXP box with the two that were already there, tried to install Windows on it. Had to disable it in the BIOS and boot off the old disk in order to use the Windows disk manager to undo the partition table before the installer would recognise the full size, then had to disable the other disks in the BIOS so that the installer would recognise the new one as C:, but eventually I had WinXP on the big drive in the new box, and a day of gleeful copying to do.
So, I have a Windows XP machine with twin 200GB HDD and a Debian box with 80GB + 120GB. The Debian machine is running a Windows NT domain (currently a WinNT-style one, but sooner or later I'll stick LDAP behind it [whatever that means], then it'll be close as damn it to an Active Directory Server), DNS for the local network, and of course SSH to cut down on monitor-swapping.
I'm exhausted, and it's Monday morning. That's not good.
The story so far is lengthy, an epic tale of dashed hopes, heroic endeavours and triumph over adversity. Well, not that heroic, or epic, and I much prefer it when there's a decent romantic subplot in there somewhere, but still...
As you may recall, last Wednesday I had purchased a lovely new (reconditioned) hard drive, for a very reasonable price, and used it to revive my old Win98 machine (whose HDD was pretty much dead) and put Debian on it. I was suspicious that it only detected the first 137GB of the drive, but it was a cheap drive; 60GB that (I didn't need anyway) wasn't worth the hassle of sending it back.
On Day 2, I came home, turned both computers on. No DNS. I try to ask why: no SSH. I swap the monitor and keyboard over (I never bothered getting a KVM switch, because I only need it on one day every couple of years, but on that day I rue the decision to do without); the server hasn't booted. I look at the BIOS, which now thinks the drive is only 10GB.
I tried detecting it again, but the detection routine hung the computer. I deactivated the drive, but that stopped it being bootable, and subsequent attempts to turn it back to user-specified did their own little detection which hung the computer.
On Friday, I made one of my trademark stupid decisions. Bearing in mind that the drive was reconditioned (and hence prone to being a bit dodgy), I decided to send it back; I had 14 days of warranty (only 14! Bastards) and apparently under the Distance Selling Act (2000) I also had a 7-day cool-off on the transaction even if it wasn't faulty. Besides, I was impatient to get some work done on it over the weekend. So I bought an equivalent brand new drive.
Of course, got that home and it had the same problem. It's now looking like BIOS. I spoke to a knowledgeable friend who concurred, and I set to finding an update for the BIOS. There goes Friday evening: I suppose I was lucky to find it at all (we're talking about a motherboard that must be six or so years old) but I did eventually find it. The manufacturer had helpfully listed the boards by processor type, and by having an early PIII in the same socket as a PII had effectively hidden mine so that I doubted which it was. I eventually found a link to it on a forum (in French; Google is my friend). Although I was pleased to see that the update claimed to fix a known issue whereby the computer would hang trying to detect drives of more than 65GB. Hoorah!
Quite how I got it to work the first day, I don't know.
So, with that fixed, I've now got two 200GB drives, which of course I'm determined to keep both of: the one I could return was a very good deal after all, and sooner or later I'll be glad of it... Except that although each one now worked, it still only detected as 137GB; a quick look at the configuration showed that for the cylinders or sectors (or whatever; I never really worried about the physical construction of such things) it could only count to 65,500-odd (2^16-1, to be precise). Normally I'd hope the restriction was in the BIOS, but that wasn't going to help; I'd already flashed the BIOS to the last available version and the manufacturer seemed to have stopped work on it in 2000.
So began the next crazy project: take the two drives out of my Debian box and swap them with the two drives in my Windows one. Sounds simple, huh? And yes, I suppose it is, but it's just as well I only had 120GB of data on my 600GB total storage. I stuck one of the 200GB drives in with the WinXP box with the two that were already there, tried to install Windows on it. Had to disable it in the BIOS and boot off the old disk in order to use the Windows disk manager to undo the partition table before the installer would recognise the full size, then had to disable the other disks in the BIOS so that the installer would recognise the new one as C:, but eventually I had WinXP on the big drive in the new box, and a day of gleeful copying to do.
So, I have a Windows XP machine with twin 200GB HDD and a Debian box with 80GB + 120GB. The Debian machine is running a Windows NT domain (currently a WinNT-style one, but sooner or later I'll stick LDAP behind it [whatever that means], then it'll be close as damn it to an Active Directory Server), DNS for the local network, and of course SSH to cut down on monitor-swapping.
I'm exhausted, and it's Monday morning. That's not good.
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