This weekend has been something of a success for me on the PC hardware front. Earlier this year, a series of mishaps rendering my former main home PC unusable; it was a power failure that finished it off for good. My remedy was a rebuild using my then usual recipe of a Gigabyte motherboard, AMD CPU and crucial memory. However, assembling the said pieces never returned the thing to life and I ended up in no man’s land for a while, dependent on and my backup machine and laptop. That wouldn’t have been so bad but for the need for accessing data from the old behemoth’s hard drives but an external drive housing set that in order. Nevertheless, there is something unfinished about work with machines having a series of external drives hanging off them. That appearance of disarray was set to rights by the arrival of a bare bones system from Novatech in July with any assembly work restricted to the kitchen table.There was a certain pleasure in seeing a system come to life after my developing a fear that I had lost all of my PC building prowess.

That restoration of order still left finding out why those components bought earlier in the year didn’t work together well enough to give me a screen display on start-up. Having electronics testing equipment and the knowledge of its correct use would make any troubleshooting far easier but I haven’t got these. There is a place near to me where I could go for this but you are left wondering what might be said to a PC build gone wrong. Of course, the last thing that you want to be doing is embarking on a series of purchases that do not fix the problem, especially in the current economic climate.

One thing to suspect when all doesn’t turn out as hoped is the motherboard and, for whatever reason, I always suspect it last. It now looks as if that needs to change after I discovered that it was the Gigabyte motherboard that was at fault. Whether it was faulty from the outset or it came a cropper with a rogue power supply or careless with static protection is something that I’ll never know. An Asus motherboard did go rogue on me in the past and it might be that it ruined CPU’s and even a hard drive before I laid it to rest. Its eventual replacement put a stop to a year of computing misfortune and kick-started my reliance on Gigabyte. That faith is under question now but the 2009 computing hardware mishap seems to be behind me and any PC rebuilds will be done on tables and motherboards will be suspected earlier when anything goes awry.

Returning to the present, my acquisition of an ASRock K10N78 and subsequent building activities has brought a new system using an AMD Phenom X4 CPU and 4 GB of memory into use. In fact, I writing these very words using the thing. It’s all in a new TrendSonic case too (placing an elderly behemoth into retirement) and with a SATA hard drive and DVD writer. The new motherboard has onboard audio and graphics so external cards are not needed unless you are an audiophile and/or a gamer; for the record, I am neither. Those additional facilities make for easier building and fault-finding should the undesirable happen.

The new box is running the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.10 and it seems to be working without a hitch too. Earlier builds of 9.10 broke in their VirtualBox VM so you should understand the level of concern that this aroused in my mind; the last thing that you want to be doing is reinstalling an operating system because its booting capability breaks every other day. Thankfully, the RC seems to have none of these rough edges so I can upgrade the Novatech box, still my main machine and likely to remain so for now, with peace of mind when the time comes.

This weekend, I finally put my home computing displacement behind me. My laptop had become my main PC with a combination of external hard drives and an Octigen external hard drive enclosure keeping me motoring in laptop limbo. Having had no joy in the realm of PC building, I decided to go down the partially built route and order a bare bones system from Novatech. That gave me a Foxconn case and motherboard loaded up with an AMD 7850 dual core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. With the motherboard offering onboard sound and video capability, all that was needed was to add drives. I added no floppy drive but instead installed a SATA DVD Writer (not sure that it was a successful purchase, though, but that can be resolved at my leisure) and the hard drives from the old behemoth that had been serving me until its demise. A session of work on the kitchen table and some toing and froing ensued as I inched my way towards a working system.

Once I had set all of the expected hard disks into place, Ubuntu was capable of being summoned to life with the only impediment being an insistence of scanning the 1 TB Western Digital and getting stuck along the way. Not having the patience, I skipped this at start up and later unmounted the drive to let fsck to its thing while I got on with other tasks; the hold up had been the presence of VirtualBox disk images on the drive. Speaking of VirtualBox, I needed to scale back the capabilities of Compiz so things would work as they should. Otherwise, it was a matter of updating various directories with files that had appeared on external drives without making it into their usual storage areas. Windows would never have been so tolerant and, as if to prove the point, I needed to repair an XP installation in one of my virtual machines.

In the instructions that came with the new box, Novatech stated that time was a vital ingredient for a build and they weren’t wrong. The delivery arrived at 09:30 and I later got a shock when I saw the time to be 15:15! However, it was time well spent and I noticed the speed increase when putting ImageMagick through its paces with a Perl script. In time, I might get brave and be tempted to add more memory to get up to 4 GB; the motherboard may only have two slots but that’s not such a problem with my planning on sticking with 32-bit Linux for a while to come. My brief brush with its 64-bit counterpart revealed some roughness that ward me off for a little while longer. For now, I’ll leave well alone and allow things to settle down again. Lessons for the future remain and I may even mull over them in another post…

I recently got myself a 500GB Western Digital My Book, an external hard drive in other words. Bizarrely, the thing is formatted using the FAT32 file system. I appreciate that backward compatibility for Windows 9x might seem desirable but using NTFS would be more understandable, particularly given that the last of the 9x line, Windows ME, is now eight years old (there cannot be anybody who still uses that, can there?). The result is that I got core dump messages from cp commands issued from the terminal on my Ubuntu system to copy files of size in excess of 4GB last night. It surprised me at first but it now seems to be a FAT32 limitation. The idea of formatting the drive as NTFS did occur to me but GParted would not do that, at least not with my current configuration. The ext3 file system is an option but I have a spare PC with Windows 2000 so that will be a step too far for now, unless I take the plunge and bring that into the Linux universe too.

Other than the 4GB irritation, the new drive works well and was picked up and supported by Ubuntu without any hassle beyond getting it out of the box, finding a place for it on my desk and plugging in a few cables. While needing judiciousness about file sizes, it played an important role while I converted a 320 GB internal WD drive from NTFS to ext3 and may yet be vital if my Windows 2000 box gets a migration to Linux. In interim, 500 GB is a lot of space and having an external drive that size is a bonus these days. That is especially the case when you consider that the 1 terabyte threshold is on the verge of getting crossed. It certainly makes DVD’s, flash drives and other multi-gigabyte media less impressive than they otherwise might appear.