Previously, on Mark's 20% Time Blog...
I've purchased a whole new system: Intel Atom 230 based low power mother board, 1GB of DDR2-5300 RAM, 2x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives to be put in a RAID-1 mirror. Using my old Antec power supply and _REALLY_ old rack mount case, and a DVD-ROM drive I had laying around, this will be the new server... ...at least, it will be once I get a CentOS v5.3 x86_64 DVD ISO downloaded and burnt.
So, yeah. I got that DVD burned and have been trying to install an OS on my server. As soon as CentOS tries to detect the hard drives, it starts generating ATA subsystem errors. This happens no matter what hard drive I use (either of the new Western Digital drives I just bought, or the Seagate ES.2 I'm borrowing from work), whether I swap the RAM, whether I use CentOS 5.3 x86_64 or CentOS 5.0 i386 (the two ISOs I had laying around)... About the only things I haven't swapped out are the CPU/MB, power supply, and the chassis. I've posted a couple questions to the CentOS Forums with more details of the problems I'm having. Googling doesn't show anyone else having problems with my motherboard and installing CentOS, except the network driver which is a known issue and past where I'm stuck now.
I've burned the whole morning on this and I'm quite frustrated. So, to save my sanity, I'm going to turn my attention to something else. Next post.