So, I’ve had a fun expensive time of things lately. Some of it has just been the luck of the draw when dealing with a house that is 10 years old. No, it’s not an old house, but that is long enough for things to start breaking. »Read More
Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 trick
If, like me, you’re putting together a system based on the Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 motherboard with, say a Core i5 720 and some of the Gigabyte-approved G.Skill RAM, and you can’t get it through Memtest86+ at all, try the beta F4 BIOS. It adds a setting for vdroop handling that defaults to “Intel Spec” but allows you to change it to some more direct method…this resolved my bluescreens / memtest errors.
Edit from 2010: This was probably a bandaid more than anything else. The RAM eventually failed completely, so I was dealing with bad RAM from the start and trying to work around it.
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This is what happens when the sliders on the original brakes on a 112,000 mile Camry decide to seize up and wear one pad down to the backing plate.
“It’s making a little noise…”
Enough said
md0 : active raid5 sdd1[1] sdi1[0] sde1[5] sdc1[4] sdg1[3] sdh1[2]
2441919680 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]
Easier than it looked
So far, the rebuild process is going along well. Later on the 14th, I went through the hardware on the system, thinking perhaps a controller had died, or a power splitter had failed. Neither was the case, as I had forgotten that I don’t have any controllers with only two disks plugged in, and the box isn’t actually using any splitters at all. I went through the whole thing and cleaned it out and checked all of the connections, and swapped a few SATA cables that seemed to be iffy just to be safe.
Oh, fun.
Woke up this morning, and my fileserver had emailed me this:
[sourcecode]md0 : active raid5 sdh1[6](F) sdd1[5] sdc1[4] sdf1[3] sdg1[2] sdi1[7](F)
2441919680 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/4] [__UUUU][/sourcecode]
Looks like I get a trial-by-fire of MD RAID recovery tonight, once I figure out what broke.
Q8200 Overclocking Results
Not bad for an affordable motherboard (Gigabyte EP45-DS3L, $85 or so after rebate), some cheap Kingston DDR2-800 RAM, and a $30 heatsink. Core voltage is only 1.28V – I’m not going to bother pushing it harder because at this point the RAM is already overclocked and I can’t run the RAM any slower than the current speed. I’m happy with the speed, a 3.1GHz quad-core Core2 is quite the upgrade from my 2.5GHz dual-core Opteron.
One of these days I’ll probably slap a new video card in here (current one is getting a bit old, 7900GS) but I’m in no rush. Probably when the next-gen midrange gets cheap.
When I update WordPress more often than I update the blog, that’s a bad thing.
Yeah, I suppose I should probably update in here more often, though it feels like I don’t have that much to say. I suppose I can throw out an update on the crap I’m working on…
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9:10PM AZ time, November 4, 2008: Oh hell yeah.
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Today, for the first time ever, I watched a Cardinals game, rooted for them, and was rewarded for it.
Blocked punts are awesome.