Lars Wirzenius: System administration, 2005

June 30: UBCD and broken hard disk
May 24: PSU poof

Thursday, June 30, 2005

System administration: UBCD and broken hard disk

Ranting is fun and productive. If I hadn't ranted, I wouldn't have had a flood of people tell me about the Ultimate Boot CD, a CD compilation of hardware diagnostics tool (from lots of different manufacturers), and other related tools. This is so cool. It has the same HUTIL.EXE program that Samsung provides, but in a format that I can actually boot on my computers.

Thank you, Nick, Doug, Erçin, and others I've already forgotten (because they talked to me on IRC or whatever; my permanent memory is in my Archive folder in Evolution).

I'd be even happier if Samsung's utility hadn't confirmed that the disk is broken and unfixable, and also if the utility hadn't frozen my computer hard three times (ctrl-alt-del not working, power button reset the only option) before it got through the entire sequence. Ah well.

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Tuesday, May 24, 2005

System administration: PSU poof

The power supply unit in my server at home broke today, approximately at the same time as I woke. I don't know which way causality flowed.

Luckily, the PSU was still covered by warranty, and the store I bought it in had a spare, and, most importantly, my friend Droidy was able to come and install the new one. I would eventually have gotten it installed myself, but she does it much quicker and better.