and again and again and again and again...

Have you ever spent too much time on a problem because you KNEW you had a hardware problem but you didn't want to admit it, causing great delay by trying every possible remedy?

Well, I spent quite a bit of time this weekend fighting with a FreeNAS install.

It's on the machine Magrathea - it has a 20GB Western Digital PM - a 52X CD PS and two 185GB Fujitsu drives as SM and SS.

The first problem was the CD-ROM drive. Of course I mounted it in the rack without installing the OS first...duh... so it sat up there a week or two until I finally got Mrs Rex to help me pull it down. Once down I quickly got the CDROM replaced and got FreeNAS installed, RAID configured and dumped the 105GB of files/apps down from Zarquon.

Fast forward a week - I get a bug up my but and decide I need to rename the share points and volumes - but I can't log into it. I forgot the frickin password! Whenever I build a system or a group of systems I keep a sheet of rott/admin userid's and passwords - but none of them worked... So I reset the pass and tried again - but I was obviously not using the right userid because even with the pass reset I couldn't get in.

So...I nuked it. And while reinstalling found the OTHER sheet of paper that showed where I had gone in and reset the u/p on the machine for the new password scheme I've been using. DOH!

But NOW it's giving me even more headaches. On the first pass it refused to see AD0 for the install - it comes up with a list of drives to instlal to - and it's not there. Okay, reboot and go in with BootIt-NG -(GREAT app) - wipe the boot sectors and exisiting partitions and try the install again. Great, now it sees all three drives.

Got it installed and configured - went to add the disks to the NAS - the WD20GB works great. But now it's giving me headaches putting the mount point on the software raid on the dual 185's.

And back and forth and back and forth...either I couldn't see AD0 or it gives me errors trying to build the software raid...sigh...anyway, I think at this point it's a problem with one of the 185's - started a slow diag last night - we'll see.

BootIT is a great little app - I don't use the boot loader - I always cancel the install when I run it - just the partition tools make this app worth while - instantly create, delete and format whatever partition types you might want. Rex gives it a thumbs up.