Today has not been my day for computers. This afternoon while plugging away at some editing, I accidentally kicked the power cord for my external USB drive and it briefly cycled off and back on. When it came back on, my computer had frozen up.
That was weird, but after it became obvious it wasn’t going to un-freeze, I went ahead and rebooted it… and it never came back up. Long story short, after fussing with it for more than an hour, I’m about 98% sure that the motherboard shorted or something along those lines. It doesn’t POST or anything when powered on. Ugh.
I have more than one computer, though, so I disconnected the poor thing pending a new motherboard, and tried to install Ubuntu on the fastest of my spare computers. It booted, but I ran into what may be a bug in the kernel shipped with Ubuntu Feisty and handling of an older SATA chipset. Not sure, but it wouldn’t get past a ton of errors… I managed to boot Damn Small Linux on the machine just to make sure it wasn’t also dead, but Ubuntu and this machine’s controllers seemed to not like one another. Double ugh.
OK, fine, this is why I keep lots of computers around the house. Picked up an old, old machine (AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with 1GB of RAM) and managed to install Ubuntu on it just fine.
Now I just need to get a new motherboard ordered, and/or an external SATA case to get my data off the former desktop.
When people wonder “why the hell do you have so many computers?” I can point to this as an example. Always have a spare. Or two. Maybe three…
