cabbitzilla (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cabbitzilla) wrote2004-05-19 09:15 pm
cabbitzilla) wrote2004-05-19 09:15 pm
The Good... The Bad... And The Puzzling
The Good:
It's going to be tomorrow night at best before I've got the G3 installed and up and running again. As machinery started dying, more and more of the wiring in and around my desk was cannibalized and/or removed. Since I'd been wanting to move the position of my desk anyway, that'll be my project for tomorrow. There's simply been too much rain for me to be able to do things tonight; the desk is an old US Air Force surplus rig... with a 1" thick oak top and a steel body. I'm glad I don't have to move it far, or through the hallway; when that's done the damn thing's got to be disassembled in order to make it light enough to get it where it's going. It breaks down into the top, a back panel, four legs, and two small file cabinets. o.0
With the primary partition hosed on the Mac, that reinstall'll get done tonight, at least getting it to 10.0.0... hopefully getting it up to 10.2.0, where it can stay until the LAN's back up with the DSL and I can download the update (and this time burn the S.O.B. to a cd and keep it). Once the Mac's reinstall is up, it moves from the secondary setup in my bedroom and makes room for the Athlon to be de-Sassered. I'm a bit behind on the things I need to do; the barrage of thunderstorms is slowing me way down. :/
Yes, I'm trying to pick up and deal with the things that I can fix. Anyway, by tomorrow night I should have the desk in place and be able to get the wiring done up. I don't have any of the little plastic ties to do proper wire management; I'm going to have to make due with hemp cording and the occasional bit of tape. I really don't want things to fall back into the rat's nest they're in now. It's STILL a tangled disaster, even with the KVM head unit and two of the three sets of of wiring pulled out, the PS card reader pulled out, and the power cabling for both of them.... I have NO idea what the hell I was smoking when I did that, but it's going to be fixed this time; trying to work on things is next to impossible when nothing can be pulled free when needed. That's why it was such a task to remove the Athlon and the G3 from the setup... part of the cabling snafu was sitting directly behind the Athlon and included /everything/ going to the poor little Mac.
In addition to the cabling above, there's a third set of KVM cables, wiring for the speaker/subwoofer setup, wiring for the Hercules Game Theater sound module/head unit, power cables for all three of the original machines, cabling for the ViewSonic monitor, phone cables for modem and DSL, power cable for the DSL, network cabling for all three of my machines PLUS Megan's Celery 550 AND the line that runs back to my bedroom (which is currently sans hub because of the failures), and power cable for the SMC EtherEZ 8 port hub.
*pantpantpant* I've got enough wiring to strangle half of Connecticut... Given how much current this rig draws, I'm amazed that the circuit breaker for /this/ part of the house doesn't pop daily. Er, anyway, that's the project for tomorrow. Plans for tonight include a bit more Kingdom Hearts, my turns on KoL, and then the reinstall and updating of the G3. My incentive to get things done? I've handed Megan the DVD for Hell Comes To Frogtown... it's hidden until the LAN's back up. Given how kvetchy she's been about it being down, I expect she's hidden it quite well.
FIDO
- The video card that
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wibbble & elance had sent to me does indeed fix the initial power up problems of my precious little G3. < dr-frankenstien >It's alive! IT'S ALIVE! < /dr-frankenstien > - The G3 will boot cleanly from the CDROM drive, cheerfully dumping me into the OS X installation program.
- The original boot hard drive is FUBAR. The drive spins up, but the Disk Utility informs me that it has serious catalog errors (which I expect are the Mac equivalent of file allocation tables). At best, it simply will refuse to boot - at worst, the four gigs of data there are completely toasted.
- The initial boot drive, the one that's fried, is where all of my music and video files are. :( It's a loss and it frets me awful, but the machine works, and can be reinstalled.
- Umm... when it boots, even though it IS booting, I'm still not getting the 'bong' tone at machine startup. Does anyone know if there's a button or a little wire I need to check on to make sure things are set up? I can't seem to get into that piece of the case to trace wires.... it's obviously built for Lilliputians and designed to be worked on ONLY by them. :p
- 'The Opening of the Package' proved to be curious. I felt like I was playing with Russian nesting dolls; a box, and inside that a bag, and inside that was another bag, and inside that was another box, and inside that was another bag, and inside that was another box, and inside that was a bag, and inside that was the Radeon 7000 Mac Edition video card. When I hit the third box I was REALLY puzzled, wondering who'd play that sort of prank on me.
- wibbble, darling, you'd pointed me at the update package to take 10.2.0 up to 10.2.8... any chance you can point it out to me again?
It's going to be tomorrow night at best before I've got the G3 installed and up and running again. As machinery started dying, more and more of the wiring in and around my desk was cannibalized and/or removed. Since I'd been wanting to move the position of my desk anyway, that'll be my project for tomorrow. There's simply been too much rain for me to be able to do things tonight; the desk is an old US Air Force surplus rig... with a 1" thick oak top and a steel body. I'm glad I don't have to move it far, or through the hallway; when that's done the damn thing's got to be disassembled in order to make it light enough to get it where it's going. It breaks down into the top, a back panel, four legs, and two small file cabinets. o.0
With the primary partition hosed on the Mac, that reinstall'll get done tonight, at least getting it to 10.0.0... hopefully getting it up to 10.2.0, where it can stay until the LAN's back up with the DSL and I can download the update (and this time burn the S.O.B. to a cd and keep it). Once the Mac's reinstall is up, it moves from the secondary setup in my bedroom and makes room for the Athlon to be de-Sassered. I'm a bit behind on the things I need to do; the barrage of thunderstorms is slowing me way down. :/
Yes, I'm trying to pick up and deal with the things that I can fix. Anyway, by tomorrow night I should have the desk in place and be able to get the wiring done up. I don't have any of the little plastic ties to do proper wire management; I'm going to have to make due with hemp cording and the occasional bit of tape. I really don't want things to fall back into the rat's nest they're in now. It's STILL a tangled disaster, even with the KVM head unit and two of the three sets of of wiring pulled out, the PS card reader pulled out, and the power cabling for both of them.... I have NO idea what the hell I was smoking when I did that, but it's going to be fixed this time; trying to work on things is next to impossible when nothing can be pulled free when needed. That's why it was such a task to remove the Athlon and the G3 from the setup... part of the cabling snafu was sitting directly behind the Athlon and included /everything/ going to the poor little Mac.
In addition to the cabling above, there's a third set of KVM cables, wiring for the speaker/subwoofer setup, wiring for the Hercules Game Theater sound module/head unit, power cables for all three of the original machines, cabling for the ViewSonic monitor, phone cables for modem and DSL, power cable for the DSL, network cabling for all three of my machines PLUS Megan's Celery 550 AND the line that runs back to my bedroom (which is currently sans hub because of the failures), and power cable for the SMC EtherEZ 8 port hub.
*pantpantpant* I've got enough wiring to strangle half of Connecticut... Given how much current this rig draws, I'm amazed that the circuit breaker for /this/ part of the house doesn't pop daily. Er, anyway, that's the project for tomorrow. Plans for tonight include a bit more Kingdom Hearts, my turns on KoL, and then the reinstall and updating of the G3. My incentive to get things done? I've handed Megan the DVD for Hell Comes To Frogtown... it's hidden until the LAN's back up. Given how kvetchy she's been about it being down, I expect she's hidden it quite well.
FIDO