[PLUG] It's working! (Was: More hardware woes)

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Sat, Nov 19, 2022 at 12:06:56AM -0500, Rich Mingin (PLUG) via plug wrote:
> Agreed. Also, I didn't mean any slight to the MC techs. Most of them
> are just getting started in tech or haven't been in the field for
> long, so their lack of experience is a product of time spent, not
> ineptitude. I worked a similar position when I was still a post-high
> school larva. There's also little to no reward (financial or glory) in
> chasing an issue that doesn't readily appear on the workbench.

First of all, I just want to say I had no problem at all with the
techs at Micro Center. They were professional, didn't seem like a
bunch of clueless kids, and were great to deal with. I'd happily bring
my box back to them again (though hopefully with a more
straightforward problem!).

Thursday night I tried looked again for loose cables and connectors,
and got it to start up with the new drive disconnected. I shut it
down, plugged in the new drive, and powered it up. It shut down in 20
seconds or so.

So I brought it back to MC. (I'd called them during the day and they
said to bring it back in.) We put it up on their table. They found a
loose SIMM (maybe jostled while I was carrying it?), pushed it in, and
it booted up! At that point we decided the only thing to do was to
bring it home and see if it would work there. And it did!

I let it run for 24 hours, then added the new drive to the RAID array
and let it resync. That ran overnight without a hitch. I've rebooted a
few times this morning and that's all been fine too.

All I can think is that there must be something just slightly loose that
lugging it around fixed. Also replacing the drives entails turning the
box on its side, and that must have jostled things in the wrong
way. It would be nice to know exactly what caused this, but for now
I'm just glad it's working again.

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions. I'd like to particularly
thank JP for posting his `replace_mirrored_disk` script, which was
very helpful for doing the RAID part of this adventure.

Walt
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