It was a simple plan. Really.

The plan was very simple. The main server at my house is called chromite. It had two hard drives in it, both of them 60 GiByte IDE drives arranged basically as a 20 Gig root partition and 100 Gig worth of an LVM (Logical Volume Manager) volume group, partitioned out into a number of partitions. The problem was twofold. First, LVM offers no redundancy or error recovery at all, and one of the drives is throwing sporadic errors. Second, we were running out of space.

I priced tape backups and such and, well, that's not an option. Now, I understand that RAID isn't backup, but it's a whole lot cheaper to install a RAID array and be careful about deleting stuff than it is to put together an effective backup plan. So, the plan was to buy a 5-drive hot-swap drive bay and some SATA drives. Originally, the plan was to use 300 GiByte drives in 900 GiByte RAID-6 array, but when my wife pointed out that "18 is hard drives" (our anniversary is in February) that got upgraded to 500 GiByte drives (refurbished 500 GiB SATA drives are $50) in a 1500 GiByte array, and that was the plan: Just chuck a mess of drives into the existing computer and go off all happy.

Then, I started thinking about it. If I put the new drive bay and drives into the existing computer, the computer would be down while I did all this and got it all to work. Also, I noticed that I had a computer that hadn't done anything since the hard drive failed at last year's Apollocon and then I noticed that the current chromite had 512 MBytes of RAM and it wasn't possible to add any more.

At that point, I hatched the plan. Max out "dragon" (the name of this computer with the failed drive) with new RAM and the hot swap bay, get it all set up and put chromite's drives in it. At which point, I could move the data off the iffy hard drive and onto the new drive array and Bob's my uncle. At that point, I put the drive array into Dragon's case and, well, it didn't fit. Dangit! So, I had another computer lying around (called "megaman") with a slightly larger case, and an older motherboard. After swapping the motherboard out and putting the drive bay in, and spending $80 on 2 Gigs of DDR RAM, I plugged it in and turned it on and...got sparks. Dang power supply was bad.

A trip to the store to get a new power supply and some time to install it and, after determining that I had the wrong cable plugged into that four-pin socket by the CPU, it came up and ran. Whew! No damage. (Such a relief) Okay, at this point, all five drives had arrived, and I put the two SATA adapters into the computer and put all the drives in and turned it on and...it wouldn't boot. Damn.

The thing is, taking one of the drives out of the hot-swap bay caused everything to work. Shoot. Maybe it's the SATA adapter. So, back to the Micro Center to buy a $45 SATA card (it was the only one we could find that adapted SATA into PCI, which is what I needed) and, oh, what the heck, I'll buy another gig of RAM. Total, about $100. I think I actually bought the blank back plates the previous time.

The only problem is that it didn't change the behavior of the computer. Two SATA adapters, no boot, but using only one the system came up just fine. I fiddled with GRUB and tried every option I could think of, but no joy. I did find out a lot about GRUB that I'd forgotten since the last time I'd had to actually understand what was going on.

At this point, the conclusion was inescapable: The BIOS was screwing it up, somehow, so I needed a new BIOS. I downloaded the image and put it on a floppy and ran the "Q-Update" and, I had the wrong BIOS image. After downloading a new image, one that matched this time, and running the "Q-Update" program and it said it worked. Now to reboot...why does it say it's looking for a BIOS image on the hard drive?

Crap! I bricked the board! A quick google got me a list of instructions of how to burn a CD-ROM to recover from the situation. Now, I have CD-ROM's and burners and such and, shoot, I couldn't get the disk out of the DVD-ROM I'd been using and, well, I kind of destroyed the son-of-a-gun trying to get the disk out. Never mind, I saw DVD+-RW/Dual layer drives for $25 at the Micro Center, so it's time for another road trip. (Oh, and I'd been having trouble with the RAM, so I also bought a $5 can of compressed air to blow the ram slots clean.)

The only problem is that I never figured out how to burn the CD properly to make it all work. At this point, I had a choice: I could spend a lot more money and just scrap the existing motherboard, CPU, and RAM and almost certainly get it to work or I could try to unsolder the BIOS chip (it's a Gigabyte GA-7N400L which has the BIOS soldered into the board) and order a new one or, well, something. I don't know.

The thing is, even if I got the motherboard working and the BIOS updated, it might not ever properly build whatever table it's mangling so it might never work with the SATA drives, so I punted. I went to Fry's (I prefer Fry's for motherboards because they're all laid out on the display and it's easy to find options.) Of course, I took a list of characteristics of the GA-7N400 (AMD Socket A, DDR RAM, etc) so I could find a motherboard that might reuse the CPU and RAM and I wouldn't have to pay so much. Of course, all the motherboards are DDR2 or DDR3 and Socket A is positively stone age. Fortunately, they sold me an "open box" CPU and RAM for a substantial discount. Still, with the CD and DVD blanks I also bought, I got out for $260.

The thing is, it all worked. The system came up and ran and was fast, when I finally got the hard drives moved, it just worked. The actual moving of the server was an anticlimax, and the system just sits there chugging away much faster than it ever did before with the blinkenlights on the hard drive array flashing impressively.

Too bad I wound up spending three or four times what I had expected to for the whole thing. Not to mention the hours of my life spent in frustration, but I'm much better now.