jmoiron.net

I bought this new machine, part by part. The Antec case is nice, but there are a few things I wish it had (removable motherboard tray, a more easily removable front) and a few things I wish it lacked (2 bright LED's on the front, an optical drive door).

Installing debian on it has been quite a total bitch; maybe even a bitch and a half. I don't know what is up with the sata controller on there; it might even be these mystery raptors that Johnny gave me, but nothing takes to these things. I finally got a system booting with raid0 on each one after doing some ridiculous swap trick with the pci raid card I have, and then while I was doing some updates the array went to shit and everything exploded.

I tried again using the same trick (which had worked twice in a row), and things just wouldn't go. I'm going to eventually do a bad block check on these raptors, to make sure that they.. well, work. So right now, after 3 days and 12 to 14 hours of tweaking, I still have no system. I might be forced to use one of my IDE drives as the root; I'm seriously thinking of doing this upon my return sunday.

During the whole ordeal, I had been going to #debian for help. I figured, maybe someone here knows why Grub might be failing. The first night, I had been installing the system root to a raid0 partition, and this totally preoccupied everyone.

• "You can't install onto a raid0; grub doesn't work like that."
• "You shouldn't use raid0 (at all | for your / partition); it's unstable. You'll lose all your data."
• "Have you even tried LILO?"
• "Oh you're using etch. You know what etch is, right?"

I was well aware of course, exactly what they were thinking. I know need a separate boot partition; I had it. I won't lose any data, I'll just lose my operating system. Those are easy to replace; my data will live safely on a raid5 volume. I haven't tried LILO, and that's because I want to use grub. (This is kind of like asking someone if they've even tried DebianBSD while they're asking for help installing Linux) I know what etch is, and if you don't encourage smart people like me to use your testing builds then testing will never get stable.

I understand what people mean, when they say that the Linux community is full of arrogant pricks, but I had always kinda fogriven (them | us?) because at least they're helpful. But.. often, they aren't. You have to show them at length that you know what the fuck you're doing, and even if you've displayed knowledge past the point that they have they'll still claim that you are suffering from ridiculous problems (or just chalk it up to the software you're using being "testing" or "beta" or having no warranties). JWZ writes at length about this problem; he's kind of relegated to throwing out queries to the "lazyweb".

update

The problem with my computer ended up being the overclock settings. It was doing +400mhz quite comfortably temperature wise, but the extra voltage must have been doing something bad to some component or another; probably the controller or the ram. In any case, the system is up and running now, and is quite nice. MY BAD.