The mobo died in my file server, so I decided to upgrade and actually get a modern motherboard for it, with actual hardware RAID, etc. I bought an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI (I didn’t really need the video features, but the price was good).

When I try booting it into Fedora Core 6, the hard drive hangs. Fine, no surprise. It doesn’t recognize the hardware (I was going from a Sempron to an Athlon-64 X-2).

The problem is, I can’t boot from an installation disk or a rescue disk, either. It gets to the point at which it says:

running sbin/loader

…and then, nothing. Just a flashing cursor. I’ve let it go for half an hour, with no joy. Is it possible that the motherboard is of such a recent vintage that Anaconda doesn’t know how to deal with it? I’ve never before had a machine that I couldn’t boot into Linux from a CD.

[Update after doing a search for “Linux M2A-VM boot problems”]

Apparently I had to disable HPET. It seems to be working now.

[Late night update]

Uh, oh.

“Cannot find any Linux partitions on your drive.”

Well, that’s why I’m going to RAID 1…

[Wednesday evening update]

Even though I found the old installation on the IDE drive, because X is broken, I decided to try to do an installation on the new dual 250-meg SATAs. Unfortunately, neither the original installation or the install CDs can find the LAN connector. I look at the BIOS, and it says it’s enabled. Any ideas?

I can install without it, but the machine won’t be of much value if the OS can’t talk to the rest of the local network, let alone the Internet.

I’ve got a long fuse, and a slow one, but it’s not infinite in either regard. If anyone wonders why Brian Swiderski will no longer be posting here (at least under that IP), the reason can be found here:

Do you imagine I’m trying to be persuasive? If I were, you wouldn’t even be talking to me–you’d be brooding over your own confusion, and then later congratulating yourself on having convinced me of your ideas.

If he’s not even trying to change anyone’s mind, I see no reason at all to any further tolerate his ongoing pollution of my web site.

I’ve banned Anonymous Moron (again). In case anyone wonders why, it was a comment here. But I would think that most people who have been reading his vile idiocy don’t need an explanation, and wonder why I didn’t do it sooner.

I’m going out for a beer, then off to the airport, then back to Florida, where we’re getting the first tropical activity of the season and some badly needed rain.

More later.

But I’m having a hectic week. I went from the conference in Dallas on Sunday to Missouri for a family barbecue, then spent another three days there while also working. I flew back to Florida last night, but we had flight delays due to severe weather in Dallas, and didn’t get in until about 1 AM. Then, after about three hours sleep, I got up and drove back to the airport and got on a plane to DC, where I am now, having worked all day on a client presentation for tomorrow. Probably won’t come up for air until the weekend.

But I’m having a hectic week. I went from the conference in Dallas on Sunday to Missouri for a family barbecue, then spent another three days there while also working. I flew back to Florida last night, but we had flight delays due to severe weather in Dallas, and didn’t get in until about 1 AM. Then, after about three hours sleep, I got up and drove back to the airport and got on a plane to DC, where I am now, having worked all day on a client presentation for tomorrow. Probably won’t come up for air until the weekend.

But I’m having a hectic week. I went from the conference in Dallas on Sunday to Missouri for a family barbecue, then spent another three days there while also working. I flew back to Florida last night, but we had flight delays due to severe weather in Dallas, and didn’t get in until about 1 AM. Then, after about three hours sleep, I got up and drove back to the airport and got on a plane to DC, where I am now, having worked all day on a client presentation for tomorrow. Probably won’t come up for air until the weekend.

Blogging will be light. I’m going to the ISDC in Dallas, where I’ll be participating in a space blogger summit on Saturday afternoon. I’m not leaving for there until tomorrow morning (and I’ll be leaving the conference Sunday morning), but I have a lot of billable work to do before I leave.

I’ve had enough. More than half the comments on this post were from Oler, and they were generally nonsense, and generated a lot more unnecessary posts to respond to him. When I compared it to this post, in which he didn’t participate, and there was a reasoned and intelligent discussion, I just wondered, “why”? I can’t help but think that the correlation is meaningful.

The signal/noise ratio from him being zero, to first order, I’ve banned him from this blog. I, and my readers just have better things to do with our lives than to respond to his fantasies.

I just discovered that Sitemeter has been putting tracking cookies for realmedia.com on my visitors’ machines. There may be some others as well.

I went in, cleared cookies, refreshed Transterrestrial, and the Realmedia cookies showed up again. I’m going to quit using Sitemeter, but I need to do a little research and figure out what to switch to for stats checking. In the meantime, you might want to block cookies from realmedia.com (and the others mentioned in the link, such as specificclick.net) if you don’t want them selling your browsing habits without your permission.