Geek Wars – The Hardware Strikes Back
…Or how to dig yourself into a technological hole without really trying.
I recently had two personal technology projects come to the top of my to-do list. The first was a storage upgrade in my computer, the second a storage upgrade and configuration change on my FreeNAS server. Neither one should be particularly difficult, right?
Strike One!
Task one, upgrade the storage hard drive in my computer from a pair of full 160GB drives to a single 1TB drive. Should be simple, right? Put new drive in and format it, then copy data from the old ones and remove them. And in that one sentence there was much pain.
It seems that when I installed Windows Vista on this system, some three years ago, the installation had gone a little awry. Instead of using the designated boot drive to install the boot sector, the installer had put it on the first drive on the controller. Normally this would not be a problem, but this was one of the 160GB IDE drives, which was now sitting on the bench. The result of this was the system no longer boots. I tried booting with a WinPE disk I had to hand, but this was optimised for my old IBM laptop and as such only has drivers for Intel chipsets, and it would not initialize the ULi hard drive controller in my AMD system. To make things worse, my Windows installation toolkit (a.k.a. WAIK) was on the inaccessible boot drive so I couldn’t create a new WinPE disk and I didn’t feel like downloading it’s 900MB installation package again. My Windows 7 disk is an upgrade, and that would not boot either.
In the end I used a Windows 7 RC (“release candidate”) DVD to boot the system, then loaded the RAID controller drivers from a thumb drive. This let me run a startup repair and put the missing files onto the correct boot drive. Now the system works again. This should have taken less than an hour, but took 3 hours.
Strike two!
On to the server upgrade. This was going to be a bit more involved, as I was planning on taking the existing 160Gb drive (which it boots from) and using it as half of a RAID1 pair with one of the drives from my computer. Because I was going to be using software raid, I needed a device to boot from. One of the nice features of FreeNAS is the ability to install and boot from a USB thumb drive or a CF card. The plan was this – boot from a spare USB drive and use the two 160GB drives as a mirrored pair, and use the third 160GB drive for backup.
The Gateway PC that I have been using for the FreeNAS box has front panel USB ports, but I didn’t feel happy having a drive hanging out in space, where any passing cat could snag it as a chew toy. Same with the rear panel ports. Rooting through my box o’junk turned up a set of USB headers, the kind that are installed in a spare card slot. I didn’t want them on the back panel, but something could be worked out… I cut the zip ties holding it together then removed one of the two headers and carefully hammered the bracket flat and screwed it to the blank card slot between the video card and ethernet adapter.
Perfect! This would hold the USB stick inside the case where it could be easily reached if necessary, and the case will still close. Also visible in this picture are the 8MB ATI Rage video card, the RealTek gigabit ethernet adapter and the Promise ATA133 hard drive controller. To finish off, the two 160GB ATA drives were mounted in the appropriate slots and connected to the controller, one on each channel, and a FreeNAS boot disk was burned.
Initial installation was a breeze. The FreeNAS cd booted to the usual menu and installation proceeded apace. To be honest, there are not many things that need to be done to install FreeNAS – basically tell it the kind of installation and where it should go, then leave it to its own devices. Installation completed, the system booted and… wait. It seems the USB stick I was using was slower than continental drift. Time for a drink. The trip to the fridge and back was enough time for it boot, so I could configure the IP address and ethernet adaptor. No problems so far, so back upstairs to the office. Logging into the configuration UI showed the system stats, and I was able to configure the two ATA drives as a RAID1 pair. Reboot to complete setup, and… nothing. Cannot connect to the web interface and using PING to the hostname or IP address only got time-outs. Back downstairs, and it has reverted to the old IP address. Odd, but I reconfigured the adapter and went back upstairs. Only the share is not visible now. Back into the config pages and it seem that none of the settings were saved. Rats. Reset everything, recreate the RAID1 array, all working. But it wants to restart… and now it’s not working. Time for a break.
After half-hour of daytime TV, I came back with a new plan. I have an old laptop hard drive lying around. It only holds 2.1GB and spins at 3400RPM, but that’s plenty to store the FreeNAS system and configuration. I found the drive in the box o’junk, along with the 2.5″/3.5″ adaptor and installed it. Useful tip – did you know the mounting screws on the side of a 2.5″ hard drive are spaced the same as those on a 5 1/4″ CD-ROM? Me neither, but it made it easy to mount the drive in a spare 5 1/4″ drive bay. Boot up, reinstall FreeNAS and configure. Reboot and all the settings are still there. Looking good. I then spent 90 minutes restoring the backup (more daytime TV) and we’re all done.
Foul Ball!
Only not quite. I happened to go back down to the basement (I’d left my iced tea down there) and the FreeNAS box is making a loud screeching sound. Uh-oh, impending head crash. I powered the server off, then back on but its dead, Jim. The old hard drive is no more. I found another drive that works, so installed that one and ran through the installation and configuration process again. This time it seems to have worked, as the FreeNAS server would store it’s configuration settings and came back up after a restart. Much better, especially the lack of disturbing mechanical noises. All my data is present and correct, I think this is finished. What should have been a couple of hours took me 7 hours to complete, not including daytime TV watching. To celebrate, I took the dead laptop hard drive outside and hit it with a big hammer. Another useless fact – laptop hard drives have glass platters that shatter nicely when hit with the BFH.
You’re Out!
Just as I’m getting comfortable, thinking my hardware woes are gone, along comes Mother Nature to help. A nearby lightning storm caused a power glitch which fried the NIC in the FreeNAS system. Here we go again… But at least I had a spare to use instead so I didn’t have to fall back to using the built-in 100Mbit connection, and damage was restricted to a $10 card instead of the whole system so I guess my luck mostly held, for once.
But I’m not counting on it…
