Up until now the only external storage I had (apart from the DVD and CD backups) was a 320GB external disk drive on my desktop system. I had been booting into linux (it’s a dual boot desktop) and mounting that as an nfs drive and doing all my server CD/DVD image backups to it; then having to boot back into WinXp and doing that backup to it. Basically my desktop was out of action for a day whenever I decided full system backups were due.
So last week I purchased a 1TB external hard drive for my good old faithfull linux development server (now 1TB drives are finally under $300 in NZ why not). The idea being simply that will now be the nfs server and I will do all my backups to that, as that server is almost always on so I can automate the linux backups and make it a samba share for the WinXP backups to write to, it seemed like a good idea.
Anyway, did I mention it was old :-). Couldn’t find a USB port on it anywhere.
So yesterday off with the covers, lots of free slots what a great little box. It only had 256MB of memory so I thought I’d upgrade that while the covers were off; pulled out the memory card, wiped off the dust, the label read PC133 (did I mention it was old) so I knew that was going to be an issue.
Anyway, down to Dick Smiths to but a PCI USB card, no probs. They didn’t sell PC133 anymore though. Across to Noel Lemmings, nope no PC133 sold there anymore either. Looks like time for trademe… I’m winning the bidding on a nice cheap 512MB card now, should go for about $25. While a total of 768MB should be more than the server ever needs (it has no probs on 256MB as it is), but if memory is hard to come by now I may as well get it now and I’ll probably get at least one more 512 and 256 cards as spares.
Anyway, enough of that. I got the USB card which was the immediate goal. Installed that with no problems. Picked up the memory card, removed a bit more dust, cleared away some of the dust around the card slot, thinking to myself this is going to fry, and reinserted the old 256MB memory card.
Turned on the power. No problems with the memory card, and linux detected and configured the USB card perfectly, four available ports.
Connected a four port powered USB hub (Ok, I didn’t need it with four USB ports now available), but the only other thing I’m likely to plug into a USB port on that server is my external DVD writer; and while the disk drive and DVD drive are powered I’d rather have a powered hub as well to be on the safe side), and linux detected it and configured it as soon as it was plugged in; impressive (very impressive compared with the way WinXP threw up… see a little below).
So I powered on the new disk drive and plugged it into the hub; gosh I like linux, it just detected it straight away and created the /dev/sdb1 device for me. Issued a mount command for it, it autodected at as ntfs so I knew what to add to the fstab for it (as noauto of course in case it’s powered off when I boot). And that was it, all done, I like linux.
Windows on the other hand
I got the four port powered hub from my desktop, I replaced that with a seven port hub as I was sick of swapping cables all the time (disk/camera/webcam/printer/usb drives/dvd etc), the seven port hub will handle them all.
The only problem is the WinXP system started running like a dog, into control-panel/system/hardware… since when did I have about 40 IEEE1394 devices, most of them in error state. Detailed displays of those in error state showed device conflicts, what a supprise. WinXP didn’t care the four port had been replaced by a seven port it still retained info on the four port one and it could’t address those and the new one (plud it added them in a generic device category instead of a USB entry), it also got so confused it wanted the device driver reinstalled (I probably should not have clicked ok to that, I think thats were it went from about 20 to about 40 devices).
Tried all the usual disabling, deleting of devices, eventually decided I was making it worse.
So booted off a restore point taken in february (with the usb hub unplugged). It came up clean, no devices in error state (and only one non-network IEEE1394 device left like there should be). Plugged in the seven port USB hub again, and windows detected all of the connected devices just fine, and only the one IEEE1394 device still.
Anyway, it’s stable. Another manual restore point taken.
And then copied all the backup data off the 320GB drive to the new 1TB drive through my 10Mb switch (its a 100/10 switch but my dev server only has a 10Mb network card). That took over 12 hours, but it’s done.
Now I can boot the desktop into WinXP again and use it for what WinXP is good for, playing games.
