The primary rule when working with any sort of technical equipment is, or should be, don’t fuck with it when you’re not on top of your game, no matter how simple the problem would appear.

I’ve been dealing with a bit of a mind-altering cold or flu for the past couple days, and for some odd reason, I decided that I could shutdown my file server, pop in a new 200GB hard drive to ease the strain that MythTV has been putting on my available drive space; I guess I need to watch my recorded shows quicker. I shut the machine down, popped in the new SATA drive, plugged it into the RocketRaid PCI drive controller, into power, and turned on the machine.

Nothing.

Well, the little green light on the motherboard that indicates power did light up, but no drives spinning up, no CPU fan, no video. I’ve been suspicious of the SATA drive controller, which has behaved oddly on boot before. So, out that comes, and still nothing. After 15 minutes of fevered confusion and plugging and replugging I managed to get the system spinning the fans and hard drives for about 10 seconds before powering off. I reset the CMOS, pulled the battery, etc. No change.

Disconnected EVERYTHING, all hard drives, all memory, and even the speaker connection and the LED connectors. I put in the barest essentials and STILL damn thing shuts itself off. I jumpered the CMOS again and tried one more time. No fucking difference. Gave up, took some NyQuil and crashed.

Got up in the morning, jiggled the cables, poked at the spark plugs, and nothing changed. Time to admit defeat; something here is dead. It appears to be power supply for sure, and I’m still suspicious of the SATA card, and consider replacing the motherboard with one that has SATA onboard, on the off chance that the MB or the SATA is dead too. It’s a 20 minute bus ride to the computer store, so it’s a matter of choosing carefully. The guy in the store agrees on the power supply but doesn’t believe that it’d be the MB; no worries, as they don’t have the motherboard I’d want. I didn’t want to have to recompile my kernel, add drivers, or fight with MythTV some more, so I took my chances and just picked up a new powersupply.

Came home, popped in the new supply and, sure enough, the system didn’t automatically shut off after a couple seconds anymore. The drives all spin up, and everything sounds good… but no video out to the TV over the composite. Drag the Emergency 12″ VGA monitor over to the system, and there’s no video on that, either.

I pulled everything off once again, and reconnected one cable at a time….No TV tuner and nothing beyond a single IDE drive attached.

Still no video.

Download the MB manual, and eventually I start checking jumpers…

I had the “Reset CMOS” jumper on the wrong pair of pins; it was shorted and shouldn’t be. I set it back to default, and power comes right up, video, SATA controller’s BIOS, and tada… GRUB boot screen. I shut the system down and put everything back in the system. It’s up and running fine now.

Now, while I’m still feverish, I’ve created an LVM partition on the new drive in anticipation of tackling something I’ve never messed with before; turning my two 200GB SATA drives into one big virtual device. This should end well.