Here is a story. A story of how Murphy decided to pay me a visit and break me at every possible step.

One of my old but loyal customers called with a problem. He had purchased his computer from my company in 2002 with an onboard RAID 1 mirror. On Thursday he had an issue with the RAID 1 array of the non fatal but impending doom type and called for assistance. It sounded to me to be some minor inconsistency between the file systems, so I told him to bring in the computer and I take care of it. He let me know that he needed the computer back quickly because he uses it for his business, programming custom applications. I told him that I would look at it on the spot and let him bypass the queue, since he spent so much money on it so long ago.

Later on Thursday, he brought in the computer, and as a good technician, I looked at the guts of the machine just to make sure that everything was okay. Everything was not okay. The motherboard had a few bad capacitors, which means in a best case scenario, the capacitors were the cause of his RAID issue, we replace the RAID controller with a PCI card and send him on his way. In a worst case scenario, the mobo dies tomorrow and he has no computer. We erred on the side of caution, and decided to replace his motherboard. We discussed his options, and because of the age of his machine, decided not just to replace the motherboard, but the CPU and RAM too. We also decided to reuse as much of his other functional hardware as possible to save money. I informed him I did not have the parts in stock, but would have them tomorrow (Friday). He was okay with this, so I put the parts on order and let him know I would contact him Friday.

Friday morning comes along and the parts come in. The parts we decided on were the Intel Tower Lake motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo 6550, 2 GB DDR2-800, and 2 160GB SATA3 Drives. I took his current computer, a hoss of a machine built in a small upright server case, removed the old guts and built the new guts into it. And then pain began.

Because the customer’s case was an upright server tower, his Optical bays were really high in the case. The Intel Tower Lake board’s IDE port is on the absolute ass bottom of the board. I did not have an IDE cable that fell within the maximum spec. length that would reach his Optical Drives. Because of my somewhat limited inventory, I had to come up with a solution on the fly, which was to rebuild the computer in a smaller case that would reach the IDE drives to the IDE port. Of course, because this added more cost for the customer, I had to get his approval to do it. I tried to call him, but I could not reach him on either number, and there was no voice mail (?) so I decided to just do it. I could do some finagling with the invoice and get the price within the 5% estimate requirement Ohio has set. No big deal. Of course, this added more work because I had to unbuild his computer from the old case and rebuild it in the new case. Blah.

I got the machine built in the new case and all was well. Next, because he replaced his old build with a new one that also had a RAID 1 array, AND because he wanted his “system state” (install of Windows, programs, settings, etc.) to be exactly the same when he got the computer back, I had to somehow clone the old RAID array to the new one. Usually this is not an issue: you just “build” the new array on the new machine, and use clone software to clone one of the old RAID members to the new array. I found out that there was to be an issue. I tried to do this clone as stated above by booting the machine to my utilities CD, which has MS-DOS 7 and Norton Ghost for DOS on it. DOS is on an emulated A: drive, and the Ghost tool is on the CD-Drive partition proper. This wonderful computer, upon booting, decided that it did not want to detect the CD-Drive, unlike every other normal computer would, so I could not get access to my Ghost tool.

An option to this problem would be to create a very bare DOS floppy disk with the Ghost tool on it, boot to that, and do the clone. That was not to be, as the Intel Tower Lake board does not have a floppy controller. (Yes, I could have used a USB floppy drive, and I -had- a USB floppy drive available, but I did not realize this. As I become frustrated, I start to forget my skills and kinda collapse into a pile of useless skin.) So, I had to invent a new solution. After a quick consult with my technicians, it was suggested to add another hard drive to the computer that had a very basic DOS or Windows 98 install with the Ghost tool on it. I did this, attached the drive and got the clone going. The customer had about 40 GB of data, so the clone took about 2 hours. I took this time to do some other work and came back to it later.

Later has arrived. I detached all the crap and put the machine back into its normal state. At this point, because the installation of Windows on the machine is configured for another set of hardware, you have a 20/80 chance of having the computer boot properly, or dropping to a 0x7B BSOD. (It does this because the system HAL is configured for the chipset of the old motherboard, not the new one, and cannot properly mount the hard drive for full read/write access. When this happens, Windows DFO’s [done falls over]). What happens? 0x7B BSOD. The fix for this problem is simple: drop a Windows CD in the machine that matches the customers installation of Windows and perform a Repair Install.

I dropped the CD in the drive, and boot to it. The installer does it’s normal thing of loading all the storage drivers and file system drivers and all that jazz. When that is done, it will normally pop to a screen to give you the option of Installing Windows, loading a Recovery Console or quitting. What happened instead was a 0x7B BSOD. Yep. I got a 0x7B BSOD while trying to load the Windows Installer. In my entire career, that has never ever ever happened before.

At this point I am so frustrated that I cant think straight, so called my vendor and talked to Matt. (Let me take a moment to introduce you to Matt. Matt is the ubergeek to end all ubergeeks. He knows absolutely everything about every motherboard and processor ever released, every feature and failure of every operating system. He knows how to set up and maintain Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac networks on an -expert- level. He knows computer hardware, software, electronics, electrical, plumbing, and cars. He has memorized just about every technical specification or technology standard imaginable and can basically recite the TCP RFC. He plays video games fervently, and does everything a nerd would do. On top of that, he actually has a life and friends, goes out on the weekends and is generally a complete genius. He is the geek I always wanted to be, but never had the brain power to do.) I told Matt about my specific problem and he told me that the Tower Lake board does not have the IDE controller built into the Chipset in a standard manner, and instead has discreet logic accessible more like a SCSI controller, so the Windows installer loses access to the CD-Drive and BSODs in the same manner as if you had changed the mobo (which changes the hard drive controller… you get the idea.) Matt informed me that you have to attach a USB floppy drive and load the IDE controller driver and the RAID controller driver off floppies SCSI-Style before proceeding with the Windows installation, or it will do exactly what it did. (At this point I remembered that I had a USB floppy in the shop and realized that the Hard Drive trick I used earlier to do the drive Clone was a waste of time. Ugh.) So, I followed Matt’s advise and tried the Floppy trick.

I attached the floppy drive, rebooted, and started the Install. I hit F6 to tell the installer to load the drivers off the floppy. The installer stopped where it should and prompted me for the disc. I put the disc in the drive and hit enter, and the machine decided to lock up and “beep” the speaker continuously. It would NOT load the driver, and would NOT finish the Windows install. At this point I can actually -feel- my hair graying. I shut the machine off and tried every other USB port on the machine. Same results.

Now, frustrated to the point of brain melt, I called up Matt again and asked for some more help. He told me that he had never heard of the freeze/beep problem before, but a way around it is to use a tool called NLite to create a slipstreamed CD that has Windows and the Drivers together on the same Disc, so I don’t have to worry about the floppy issue. He gave me instructions and bid me good luck.

I followed his instructions, burned my CD, and booted to it. The Windows installer stopped fatally stating a file was missing. So I downloaded my drivers again, did the process again, created a new disc and tried again. Same error. I did this two more times, each with just one of the two drivers burned on the disc as a diagnostic measure. Same error. By now, I am ready to cry and have no way to get this machine up and running in any usable state. By now, it is also the end of the work day, so I made one final call to the vendor hoping Matt would be there. He had gone home. I otherwise made sure they would have some technician there on Saturday so I could go to the vendor and once and for all fix this fu**ing computer. I then went home and spent my night doing as much non techie stuph as I could because I had had enough of computers.

Saturday, I took the computer to the vendor and tried the floppy drive driver load trick I had tried before but failed. Using the vendors USB floppy, it worked and I was able to get the computer running. It seems my USB floppy was just incompatible with the customer’s motherboard. I finished the computer and headed back home.

But the story is not done. There is one final insult.

When I finally got home I realized one more problem. The Tower Lake motherboard does not have PS/2 ports. The customers uses PS/2 peripherals. I had to basically give him these peripherals for free because I failed to realize this during the estimate phase.

The good news is: the computer is working just fine and the customer’s installation is intact.

Now, excuse me while I go dye my hair back its original color and take a 2 week vacation to some tropical island full of beautiful people and no technology.