Computer cleverness -- thwarted!!!

Brought home the newer, bigger used PC from work: 2.8 GHz Pentium 4; somewhere between 512MB and 2GB RAM; 40GB hard drive; DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo-drive, floppy drive; several USB 2.0 ports; 17'' flatscreen monitor. This is the one that I has some doubts about regarding its mechanical soundness, but the very nice I.T. guy took a look at it and said it seemed fine.

I was pleased, since tomorrow as a public holiday. Thought I'd install the CD-buring software on this machine, use the DVD drive to take all the various Linux distros off the ''free'' DVDs that come with my Linux magazine, and burn some installation disks...

Well, I set it up on the dining room table (running out of room!), fired it up, and -- nothing. Or, more specifically, the BIOS probed the keyboard and the mouse -- their little light flashed reassuringly -- but nothing came on the screen. After about 30 seconds, it gave up and the hard drive stopped spinning. Throughout this, no BIOS-ish messages to the monitor. Nuthin'.

Tried it a few more times. Still nothing. Tried the monitor on the other ''video out'' port (the one that goes into the monitor, rather than the VGA(?) slot. Nothing.

Tried the LCD monitor on my other PC: works fine. So, it's not the monitor.

Tried another monitor that I know works on this troublesome machine. Tried both video-out ports. Nuthin'.

Well, that stinks. Will have to bring it back in to work, have the nice I.T. guy look at it again. (I popped the top of the case, but nothing seems loose.)


Although that route of extracting things from the DVD was thrwarted, I had another idea: Take my Win98 installation disk, install Win98 on the mega-tower, use the mega-tower's DVD-ROM drive to extract the Linux distros -- and then install the CD-burning software on the mega-tower and burn the installation disks!!!

Managed to find my Win98 installation CD. But, it got stuck early in. However, I noticed something that I had noticed, but hadn't fully absorbed before: the two hard drives in my mega-tower come up as one unified drive with a ''0-stripe''. Sounds like the two HDs are in a RAID array (when hard drives are linked together, and the data is spread across them; with a 0-stripe setup, there's a speed increase, but no benefit as far as the safety of the data).

Could that be the reason that some of the distros have had a hard time with it? Hm: might have to open the case, look at the jumpers on the HDs, and see if they're set to RAID. (No idea if that's how it's set up; will have to ask my several Computer Friends.)


Anyhow, my computer cleverness was thrwarted: two machines with DVD-able drives, and neither one will do what I need them to do.

...yet! ;)


--GG