So I’ve been missing for the last couple days online (for the most part). This post will show in all the geeky-gory detail,  why.

Warning!!!! There will be tech and some geek-speak in this post, as well as quite a few photos.

First things first, I have always built my own computer systems. It has been cheaper and I prefer knowing the components that make up my gear. Stuff like this was my bread and butter for 20+ years, and even though I no longer do IT support/admin, I am a Linux-propeller-head geek and keep up with things…or so I thought, which leads to the “nightmare” part of the title of this post.  😀

This upgrade started like every other I’ve ever done:

The new gear:

The rig before the upgrade:

Then away we go:

New gear to the left and removing the old gear on the right.

New gear plugged in on the left and first power test on the right.

Here we see that I have successfully put everything together and the system boots just fine.

Then disaster strikes. (Self inflicted disaster, but disaster nonetheless):

In this shot, we see the old gear jury-rigged on top of the new gear.

In all of my research, I missed the bits about new computer boards no longer having older EIDE hard drive connectors. It just didn’t dawn on me. So here we have me cloning a critical hard disk to a new drive. (By critical, I mean that unless I do this, my new gear will be excellent for anchoring boats…without a complete reinstall of the operating system, applications and hours of reconfiguring everything back to where I need things to be.)

And here we see the new gear with the “fixed” drive before power on tests.

AND THEN! This is where I discover that everything is still completely FUBAR, and have to set up the old gear again to re-re-clone said drive. Huge errors on the new disk meant that the new stuff was still boat anchor material.

Here we see everything back in place, with a good power up test.

Case finally closed after two days of futzing….and new gear purring along with 6 cores and 8gig ram. Relieved doesn’t begin to cover the feeling there. 😀

During that two day period, this was the way I felt, alternating between each state roughly every twenty minutes: