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I Hate PC Hardware...

ajt on 2003-11-23T12:15:59

This week a nice person at work gave me an old WD Caviar 2.5Gb hard disk. I have an old Dell system built of scrap parts that was running RedHat 6.0, and with only a 1Gb hard disk was a little cramped.

So on Saturday morning while England was winning the Rugby World cup, I performed surgery on the PC. For my sins I also swapped out an old 3Com 10MBit Ethernet card for a Netgear 100MBit one. I put it back together, and powered up. Everything was happy, I was happy, the world was happy, then the problems started....

I'd decided to replace the old RedHat 6.0 install with a new Debian 3.0, making my two Linux machines run the same OS, so at least I wouldn't go mad with all the differences. How I hate PC hardware!!!!!

  • The floppy on this machine won't read floppies written by the other machine! I had to boot into Windows98, to rawrite2 it's own boot disk.
  • The Debian installer SUCKS, the first install didn't work, the second installed everything on the wrong disks, the third crashed, but the fourth and final install worked.
  • Everything seemed okay, so I decided to copy the files I wanted back onto the machine from the other Linux box, but the Netgear card would not work. After much messing I couldn't get the tranciever to work, so I had to put back in an old 3Com card!

As I'm sure people are aware, because Debian have had some problems this week, now is not a good time to be installing packages off the Internet.

It's pouring with rain at the moment, and I feel blue, the triumph of getting it too work, doesn't overcome the pain of getting it to work. I don't mind challenges, but this one was a real pain. Debian is nice to use, but dire to install!

Before anyone suggests a nice dual G5 PowerMac, I've already thought of that....