New hardware

It seems I have a new PC. Well, a new ‘box’, anyway. It’s a long story. Hence, here’s the short version:

The Short Version

My old box broke, I bought a new one.

The Long Version

Machine playing up, occasionally random crashes, tried new RAM, new PSU, etc. Nothing seemed to help; eventually the thing wouldn’t even boot. I suspect that the problem was actually with the motherboard and/or the CPU, since the machine wasn’t even capable of running a memtest by the end.

Rather than spend ages trying to track down the real problem, and possibly running up against failed hardware anyway, I took the opportunity to get a new box. It has an Athlon-64 3500+ CPU, with 1GB RAM all sitting on a nice MSI mainboard with both SATA and IDE connectors. There’s a PCI-Express nVidia graphics card (6600-series, very fast), a 200GB SATA disk, plus a gigabit network card.

Migrating files from $OLD_SYSTEM to $NEW_SYSTEM was tricky, as it turned out. I had planned simply to copy all the files on to the new disk and then configure the machine to boot from it. Copying the files across was easy. However, getting the system to boot failed, mainly because the new disk requires SATA support and there was no (easy) way to put a SATA-enabled kernel into the not-configured-for-SATA old system. Booting Knoppix, chrooting into it and installing a kernel package won’t work, because all Debian kernel packages need to build an ‘initrd’ and that wasn’t possible via a chroot that way. I could possibly have got it working by building a completely custom kernel, but I didn’t really have time to do that, since it would probably have taken several iterations of compilation to get the right system working.

In the end I decided to keep the /home partition and blow away the rest, and installed a fresh Debian Sarge. This proved to be a simpler solution. After a little bit of tinkering with the setup, it’s all back up and running as normal. Even well enough for an excellent game of Enemy Territory yesterday evening.