Motherboard or logic board or whatever

Yesterday, my father’s mac refused to power up. He had shut it down normally the previous day. I never shut down mine for fear that it wouldn’t start up again and in his case it didn’t. So he tried all the usually remedies like resetting the SMC etc etc but when none of them worked, I was asked to take a look. I immediately suspected a broken cable like happened with mine. After taking the damned thing apart (there are about 20 screws to undo), I found the cable was ok. Anyway to be safe, I tested with another cable only to find that the computer doesn’t start up.

I bet you are itching to ask if I tried a different battery or a different power supply. You bet I did. So the only logical conclusion now is that the mother board (Illogically named the Logic board by Apple is toasted). And guess what? this is the second time that the mother board on this computer has got toasted! The first time around it was still under warranty but that is no longer the case.

There are plenty of logic boards for sale on Ebay. But they are of no use whatsoever.  That’s because Apple being as stupid as they are, have thought fit to solder the CPU onto the mother board. Yes you heard that right, in Apple notebooks you cannot upgrade the CPU unless you are an electronics engineer. Even then most electronics engineers may not have the equipment needed to replace the CPU or the motherboard at home.

The best thing to do with this macbook seems to be to cannibalize it for parts, any of the macbooks that belong to other family members or close friends are sure to develop some fault before long.

I plugged in the power cable and tried again with the same result. Next I let the battery charge some more and tried again. The last attempt was with a borrowed battery but the machine still refused to wake up. Time to take off the screws, there are many screws, including a few loose ones belonging to Jobs. I removed the top panel, unplugged the ribbon cable connecting the top panel to the mother board, put it back in and tried again. Guess what? nothing happens. Then I unplugged the machine again and shorted the pins for the power button connector with the tip of a ball point pen. Viola the machine started up! I shut it down again by connecting the mouse (there is no other way), connected the cable and tried again. Nothing happens. Thought to remove the cable and spray some contact cleaner, but the cable came apart.

I looked around for a replacement cable but it’s not available. The local apple agents would happily sell me the top panel with the cable included and I would happily by from them if they had the darned thing in stock, which they don’t. Now I am waiting for them to get one down, let’s see how it goes.

It all started when the Macbook suddenly froze up while I was browsing and wouldn’t respond at all and had to be shutdown with a long press of the power button. When I tried to start it up again, a screen with a flashing folder + question mark icon popped. Immediately I knew this had to be a toasted hard drive. This was confirmed in 2 seconds by Google.

I was pretty sure my backups were up to date but having once tossed out a dead hard drive thinking the backups were upto when they were not, I was really determined to take a close look at the drive’s contents before tossing it. That meant buying a firewire cable to attempt to connect the macbook to another in target mode. I knew the chances of it working were remote so I bought a hard drive enclosure as well. The idea was to freeze it and put it in the enclosure. Obviously you cannot put in a frozen drive back in the macbook because it would cause condensation and cause more damage. If it condensates in the enclosure you will probably be able to dry it out with a blower and still manage to reuse the enclosure later on.

You might our read that freezing a drive to recover data is a myth  or an urban legend. I can assure you that it works, when one of the hard drives on our company’s server died, the hosting company (The Webquarry) admin put the drive in the freezer and managed to recover quite a bit  of the data.

Much to my chagrin I found that I need not have bothered with any of this. The problem was with the contacts. The SATA connector appeared to have shaken itself lose. I discovered this after taking out the hard drive and putting it back in (with fingers firmly crossed of course) and it just worked!! So it was the new drive that went into the enclosure. Then I used superduper to clone the old drive into a partition on the new drive ( The old drive is only 80GB but the new one has 320GB). Then I swapped the drives and booted up with the new one. Thanks to superduper the process was painless.

Fortunately after a few rounds of emails Nokia finally relented and agreed to allow the warranty to be claimed from Nokia Care in Sri Lanka. So finally the phone was sent there yesterday and by this afternoon they had fixed it. What was the solution? To replace the camera. In the end after nearly a month of waiting for them to act, it took them less than a day to fix it. I do appreciate Nokia going out of it’s way to accommodate the warranty claim, so unless Siemens, suddenly decide to start making mobiles again my next phone is likely to be a Nokia (again).

I must appreciate the actions of the following people and organizations:

Amazon , who readily agreed to refund the purchase price if the phone was returned. We didn’t exercise this option because it wasn’t practical.

Nokia USA for agreeing to allow the warranty to be claimed from Nokia Care Sri Lanka.

Kanishka and Tharan – Two customer support executives at Nokia Care Sri Lanka.

Last but not least – my father who bought this phone as a present for me during his last visit to the states, and sent so many emails to Nokia and Amazon to try to get this fixed.

As fate would have it the faulty drive was the very drive that had the ‘/’ partition. All the files in it were rsynced onto the new drive after booting with the DVD in rescue mode. The /etc/fstab file was edited, taking care to use the UUID instead of the drive name. That’s necessary because plugging / un-plugging drives causes their drive letters to change. I kept the old drive in but booted off the new drive and used it for a couple of days before unplugging it. That’s when I started getting a blank screen on bootup.

It was time to reboot with the DVD and to try to update grub. Yet grub installed refused to do it’s task:

Could not find device for

Now that message appears to be truncated. There should be a device name at the end but it’s simply not there. I had very foolishly formatted the drive as ext4 I am beginning to think that Fedora 11 isn’t quite ready for it yet. Even so the /boot partition is ext2 (the Fedora installer refused to format it as ext4)

Then I found a post which explains how to manually installed grub. Even after following those steps, all i got was just another blank screen on boot up. I tried once more and installed the boot loader into all three of the drives I have. Then toggling through the boot sequence, I finally managed to get a grub menu on bootup instead of blank screen. I suppose you can call that progress. By manually entering the kernel and initrd parameters, I could now get the machine to progress into the next step, only to see it freeze up just before the services are started.

Fedora 11 official release is just a few days away. The easiest thing at this stage would probably be to just wait for it, But I decided to take the plunge and reinstall with the preview DVD.  Even then the installer bailed out several times apparently it’s a time zone problem (more on that later). Once I sorted that out the installer proceeded very quickly probably because it recognized the RPMs that were already installed.

I have a working machine once again, even though it still refuses to run VLC or tweetdeck and crashes when you try to use Mplayer.

While denying it’s a known issue, they are happy to fix it but the only catch is they want the phone to be sent to the US. Why is that? well my father bought it for me while in the US a little over a month ago. The prices charged by the local agents are atrocious and the E71 like many other Nokias costs about 40% more over here.

Unfortunately neither me nor my father have any immediate plans of a US visit. Claiming warranties from any Sri Lankan company is like pulling teeth so I am not keeping my fingers cross about being able to get this fixed free of charge from the local agents.

This is not my first bad experience with Nokia phones. A 6151 I had sometime ago just fell apart. It’s keyboard broke, the power button wore out and ringer stopped working. After that I had a lot of trouble with an E51 as well.

This is in stark contrast to Siemens phones that I used long ago. They were virtually indestructible. I had an M55 which I dropped at least 40 times. I used to throw it up in the air and catch it like a ball. It was supposed to be shock proof. It really was.

The Nokia E71 is a feature rich smart phone but it also happens to be a lemon. Mine is barely a month old and already the camera has stopped working. A few days ago, when I clicked the camera button, it responded by producing a blank screen I assumed this was because the battery was too low (in other phones, I have seen the phone refuse to switch the camera on, with a low battery). I connected it to the charger and left it for a couple of hours to find that the battery had completely run down and the phone had switched off. Yes it switched off on it’s own, while being plugged in. Then it refused to switch back on.

Apparently the E71 refusing to switch on is a known issue. There are plenty of google entries for it and plenty of posts in the Nokia forums. I had seen this behavior with my old E51 as well but that phone fell into a water tank, so I blamed all it’s problems on being soaked. It now seems more likely to have been inherent problems – problems common to all E series phones.

The ‘E71 refuses to switch on’ issue can be solved by taking out the battery, putting it back and then leaving it to be charged for a couple of hours again. A day passed before I needed to use the camera again now instead of a blank screen I get an error message ‘Camera: feature not supported’.

Apparently this is not something new either. There are plenty of Google entry and Nokia forum posts on it. The E71 is not the only phone effected either. Other E series phones are effected too ( example the e66 ). If you dig deeper you find that it’s not just an E Series issue but lots of other models have this problem too!!!  It’s irresponsible for Nokia to sell phones with this known issue which has been reported as far back to early 2008

In the end I had to ask the web hosting company to restart the server. When it came back up apache was running and the machine could be pinged but SSH, POP, IMAP and SMTP were all dead.  Without SSH I was dependent on the hosting company to put it right and fortunately their support is excellent. ( It’s a small outfit in California called  the Webquarry ). It turned out that one of the two hard drives on the server had just kicked off and died. Because the /home folder was on this drive SSH and the mail servers all stopped responding.

If /home was the only thing on it, we could have chucked it out and ignored a few emails that have gone missing and be done with it. Unfortunately the drive had some other stuff also on it which meant the OS was barely usable. So a new OS had to be put in (good thing too – it had Fedora Core 6 on it all this while). Then the sites had to be restored from the local copies and last but not least the mail accounts had to be recreated.

This toast hard drive has tought me several lessons though. The first and most important is that it really is time to move all the static content to Amazon S3 – it not only removes a huge load from the server(s) but also helps to make the hardware last longer; specially the hard drives. Hard drives on servers never get a moments rest and it’s no suprise that they burn out.

I don’t reboot that often but had to do so a little earlier to plug in the new hard drive. (The one that was a replacement for the dead drive. I get my stuff from a place called Mylinx. They have a pretty good service. I got the hard drive replaced with no questions asked. )

The next time I reboot, I am going to try some tweaks particularly my firewall startup script. I think I can shave off a good five seconds by doing that. The firewall script does a depmod -a . before it loads the required kernel modules and even then it checks to see if it has already been loaded. There isn’t any need to do that.  It’s better to have the modules load automatically at boot time

I also notice that fedora mounts a lot of partitions that it shouldn’t. These are partitions that are not even listed in /etc/fstab  yet they show up as /media/disk and /media/disk-1 and so on. Those partitions are are mostly bakups and residues from old installation. I need to figure out how to disable that.

On the previous occaision when I suffered a disk failure it was a loss of a partition table and one of those partitions was XFS. The partition couldn’t be recovered despite all my efforts.

This hard drive was installed less than two weeks ago. It was just idling there when I decided to move /home from another drive onto it. The /home partition was getting filled up. I have been using it that way for a week when I suddenly decided to move the swap also onto it. That operation also worked without a glitch. I then deleted the swap patition and merged the newly created free space with the neigbouring partition using parted – no trouble there either.

Trouble occured when I decided to create another partition on the new drive to fill up the empty space and move all my photos onto it – I have a separate partition for that but it’s filling up at an alarming rate. Like the fool I am I decided I will use XFS on it. And ran the mkfs.xfs command. All this was actually done while I was working on my macbook, the commands were type in using SSH. While mkfs was running, I noticed that it was painfully slow and in fact it seemed to get stuck close to the halfway mark.

At that time I walked upto the desktop to find the desktop gone. Or rather the XWindow desktop had disappeared. Ctrl-Alt-backspace brought me to the login screen but curiously all the usernames had disappeared. Since Fedora 9, I have been unable to get a console opened up with Ctrl+Alt+F1 either – but I could still open an xsession using the root account. Even then there were no noticable errors. So I tried what a windows user might have done – reboot.

On reboot the machine wouldn’t start up. It complains about missing UUIDS – one of the missing UUIDs is the newly created swap and the other is /home so it’s time for another boring and painfull recovery operation.

Here is an example of one of the problems I ran into. It’s obviously because of a conflict between the 32 bit and the 64 bit libraries.

that could be fixed by installed ‘pygpgme’ but i still get:

/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/_sqlitecache.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32

fixed by installing sqlite-devel-3.5.6-2.fc9.x86_64.rpm

At this stage I bused up my RPM all together by doing something silly, i had to sidetrack and fix rpm before getting back to yum (more about the tomorow). After rpm was restored, there was one more error (/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/_sqlitecache.so ) that was fixed with yum-metadata-parser – now finally yum is back to normal. the first thing I did was use

yum update yum

to iron out whatever hidden issues there might be. That seems to have solved most things but not all of them. I still get errors about wrong elf classes popping up and need to keep removing old RPMs and installing new ones.

Reading one svndiff window read beyond the end of the representation

This is usually caused by an error in the repository. The moment the message popped up I knew the exact cause of the error as well. My repository is older than my working copy. You will say that is always so. Well in this case, this particular working copy is at revision 187 while the repository only has 185 revisions in it!

How come? Well I lost a hard drive and lost this particular repository. I had lost another repo as well and went through the annoying process of restoring it using working copies. But I had forgotten to restore this particular repo. In the end it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The repo contains my mails. I read and reply to mails on both my macbook and my desktop and download them onto both machines as well. The mail servers use IMAP (can’t figure out why people would want to use POP3). I keep the macbook and the desktop in sync by using svn commits and updates. Unfotunately if you download into the same folder you get conflicts and because some folders contain thousands of mails the conflicts are very hard to resolve.

In the end though, I had no choice but to resolve those conflicts. The thunderbird ‘delete duplicates’ extension was a life saver.

Google was no help. The first result for ‘linux corrupt partition table recovery’ was my own page from last time around! Unfortunately gpart didn’t work this time. It’s a wonderful piece of software but it doesn’t seem to be so good at detecting XFS partitions.

There were two partitions on the hard drive, one had reiserfs and the other had XFS. I could afford to lose the reiserfs partition – it was only a set of backups, the same couldn’t be said about the xfs partition which was /var/ there I had my mysql databases, websites and subversion repositories.

Sure I had backups – but they were 12 days old. I did a comprehensive backup before moving back from Debian to Fedora and since then been negligent. Still I could afford to lose the subversion repository – all the upto date code is on another partition but it’s a tedious process to checkout each branch, copy over the files from the working copy, commit it and then checkout again.

The local copies of the websites can simply be pulled down from the live site (and the repo updated again). I did lose about half a dozen unpublished blog entries but no harm done.

Another loss was the rpm database, I had to boot with the DVD and choose the upgrade option to recreate those databases. Even then rpm -qa doesn’t show some of the packages that are in fact installed.

I used dd to copy the entire hard drive onto another and tried all sorts of things including parted and xfs_check no dice. My relationship with XFS lasted all of 12 days.

I did achieve a measure of success with my plumbing efforts and just when I thought it was over, my Nokia e51 fell into the water tank. It was soaking in the tank for a couple of minutes before I managed to fish it out.

Soaking the phone in a water tank is not the same as getting caught in the rain or dropping it into a puddle. In a puddle the water will not penetrate deep inside the phone for a few minutes. The trapped air inside will see to that. In a water tank there is pressure. If the captive air does not escape, it will be compressed (remember PV = nRT ) and the water will penetrate easily.

After fishing it out, I didn’t expect to be able to make any calls using that phone. The white LED was burning fiercely but the LCD was off. It didn’t respond to the power button so I switched itoff by pulling out the battery. Didn’t put the battery back in without using an electric blower on it for a few minutes to attempt to try it out.

Only the back cover cannot be opened. The front face plate on the E series phones cannot be removed without a special tool, which I don’t have. Putting the battery back in resulted in the white LED lighting up even before the power button was pressed. The LED turned white but didn’t get any further.

I put the phone in my camera dry cabinet and finished up the plumbing matter, and then took the phone to the nearest Nokia dealer. They don’t have the tool for it either. YOu need to drive into their repair shop at Bambalapitia and the timing was such that the place would be closed by the time I got there. The next day is a sunday.

So what I did was to keep the phone in the camera cabinet through saturday night and the whole of Sunday. On monday morning when I tried to switch it back on the phone actually did boot up. But you can still clearly see water behind the LCD.

So I used the blower on it and put it back in the dry cabinet. By evening the phone was back to normal. My investment in the camera cabinet has been recovered.

The green button (the answer button) on it died a couple of months ago. Since then I have been using the middle button to answer incoming calls. To make a call I have to click the middle button at least three times while traversing through the menus. Quite annoying but I put up with it cause I am broke thanks to the house building efforts.

Another issue with the phone is that the ringer stops working all of a sudden. It has an annoying habit of switching itself into silent mode on its own but that’s a separate issue. I have had the ringer die on me at least three times.

The most recent time it happened was just a week ago. I tried to reboot the phone because the last time it happened rebooting did the trick. Unfortunately when I pressed the power button it went in and got stuck and the phone wouldn’t switch off.

I managed to sort out the dead speaker issue by switching the phone into the silent profile and back into general profile. However I then had a bigger issue – if the batter died, I have no way of switching it back on again. In the meaintime I ordered a new phone an e61 finally got my hands on it today.

if I must go through the hassle of installing a new OS, I want it to be on new hardware. Else it’s inevitable that the old hardware will develop a fault and force a re-installation. Heck the torture of installing a DVD load of software might cause the hard drives to give up and die.

So why not get some new hardware? well I am nearly penniless thanks to the new house that I am building. It’s already over budget. And then there is the 50-500 sigma lense that I have been craving for. My sister is in the US right now and I want her to get one for me.  Cameras and lenses cost about 40% less in the US than in Sri Lanka. Unfortunately ‘the bigma’ is out of stock so it seems that I might be forced to buy a Nikon 80-400 instead. Not that I don’t like the 80-400 – it’s just a lot more expensive. That means no new hardware till next year. Heck that might mean I might even miss Fedora 7 all together and move straight on to Fedora 8.

Unfortunatley siemens doesn’t make phones any more I don’t want to buy a sheep (Benq) in wolf’s (siemens) clothing and pay the price of a wolf. So I reluctantly decided to buy a Nokia.

At first I was taken up by the Nokia N93 but sanity prevailed. What I found attractive was the video capabilities of the phone. But then having a 30 fps camera is no good because it’s still a phone camera with a lens that’s smaller than a pea Much better to buy a cheap phone and a good Sony camera.

Since dialog has started their 3G services, it’s essential that the phone should be 3G. Contrary to what dialog and nokia would have us believe 3G is not all about video conferencing. So I don’t want to buy phone that claims to be able to shoot a 3 or 4 mega pixel camera. Worse still I don’t want a phone with two cameras.

The quality of the lens and it’s size make it impossible for such a camera to produce good results. Even a very good lens can be totally messed up by one spec of dust. Heck if a DSLR can be effected by dust what chance does a phone camera with a lens that’s only slightly bigger than spec of dust have? Dust on a DSLR lens can be cleaned off, it’s the dust on the sensor that causes trouble. Interestingly, good old film cameras don’t have this problem. I am straying off topic.

The Nokia 6151 seems to be the cheapest model that has CLDC 1.1, MIDP 2.0 and WCDMA. The price is low because it’s camera is only 1.3 mega pixel. That’s the same as the camera on the 6630. With December 03, being my birthday, I persuaded my wife to buy it for me as a birthday present.

btw: IMHO: the daylight mixing with the incandescent light adds a nice touch to that photo, it’s only enhanced by the camera light. Feel free to disagree.

The most important thing I noticed about FC 6 is that KDE is no longer usable. Those wierd window effects (fading etc) seem to lead to constant lock up. It doesn’t seem possible to switch the darned thing off, The control center which used to be a prominent member of the menu seems to have disappeared! I have temporarily switched to gnome.

The second gripe is that not all the new additions in Fedora Core 6 have been installed because I chose update instead of a clean installation. A clean installation is most annoying, an update is bad enough. But with an update you are stuck if you want to add any new packages. Pirut that atrocious package manager insists on retrieving everything from the net instead of using the DVD. That’s a waste of bandwidth and time. It takes an eternity to resolve dependencies.

The only catch is that AMD 64×2 processors are not available here. Right! let’s look for an Intel core 2 duo. Most of the idiots at the companies that sell computers and computer parts in Sri Lanka. automatically give you prices for a Pentium D processor. What idiot wants to buy a D?

Very few people seem to have the core 2 duo in stock. That too only the 1.83 GHz variety and it’s atrociously priced. A processor that’s about 20k in Singapore costs closer to 30k here. And they don’t have the intel 965 series of mother boards here. Only have the 946. The 946 only supports the slower RAM. What a waste it would be to get a 1066MHz FSB processor and slow it down with slow RAM?

So it would seem that unless you want to buy a crappy solo pentium 4, you will not be able to buy a computer here in Sri Lanka. Great pity.

Unfortunately my need is more urgent. I call the BT Options (local dealers) office and asked for a discount, They offered 10% for cash payment. No discounts for credit cards. Who can blame them, the government is conciously and unconciously encouraging cash payments over credit card payments. They are very keen to drag the country back to the dark ages.

So I said, I will come over and pick up a macbook immidately. The lady at the other end of the line said, I need to call the showroom and ask them if they have stocks. They don’t You have to make your payment and wait 10 days to recieve the darned thing. Well!! Since the situation is desparate (i’m with out a computer after all) I asked to buy an IMac. They don’t have that in stock either. In fact they don’t have anything!

Yesterday, I returned from a visit to Seru Kele and was downloading the photos, when the computer shutdown for no apparent reason. Well it didn’t actually shut down, it switched off. I have seen this happen with my father’s notebook, so I reckoned that overheating was the cause. I had to go out again so , I left the machine to cool down. On my return, it simply wouldn’t start up again.

I have been very suspicious of this mother board for a while because of frequent hard disk failures. Trying to get a replacement at 8:00 pm on Sunday isn’t an easy task so I decided to find out what early to bed, early to rise feels like.

Been there, seen it but don’t have any apache T-Shirts. This time though the problem wasn’t with the group id, the Group directive in the httpd.conf file does point to a valid group. Doing the following fixed it though:

don’t ask me the theory behind it, I don’t want to know, not at this point of time anyway.

The old server died last night.

Jul 17 14:36:51 kernel: ata1: command 0x25 timeout, stat 0xd0 host_stat 0x61
Jul 17 14:36:51 kernel: ata1: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Jul 17 14:36:51 kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
Jul 17 14:36:51 kernel: sda: Current: sense key: Aborted Command
Jul 17 14:36:51 kernel:     Additional sense: Scsi parity error
Jul 17 14:36:51 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 83227991
Jul 17 14:36:51 kernel: ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xF8832C87
Jul 17 14:36:51 last message repeated 2 times
Jul 17 14:36:51 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda5): ext3_find_entry: reading directory #297570 offset 0
Jul 17 14:37:51 kernel: ata1: command 0x25 timeout, stat 0x50 host_stat 0x61

This is on a EXT-3 partion (OS is Fedora Core 5). There is another partiion with Reiserfs (I am not religious) and that fairs no better.

Jul 17 14:23:42 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sda3, logical block 5851
Jul 17 14:23:42 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sda3
Jul 17 14:23:42 kernel: ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xF8832C87
Jul 17 14:23:42 last message repeated 2 times
Jul 17 14:23:42 kernel: REISERFS: abort (device sda3): Journal write error in flush_commit_list
Jul 17 14:23:42 kernel: REISERFS: Aborting journal for filesystem on sda3
Jul 17 14:24:42 kernel: ata1: command 0x25 timeout, stat 0x50 host_stat 0x61
Jul 17 14:27:30 kernel: ata1: command 0x25 timeout, stat 0x50 host_stat 0x61

One of the partitions in question is the ‘/usr’ and when these errors occur the system even freezes (curiously enough it recorvers if you give it enuogh time). Rebooting gives you a jolt, the hard disk is not detected at all, reboot again and it’s picked up fine.

If you search the linux archives there are all kinds of explainations ranging from faulty hard drives through faulty SATA controllers to buggy kernel drivers, what’s disapoointing is that there isn’t a definite conclusion. Apparently all linux distros seem to be effected by this.

My approach was to try booting up with an Ubuntu live CD and then fsck. Unfortunatley fsck suffered the same fate, it got struck halfway through. Then I opened up the covers and liberally doused the connectors and the card with contact cleaner and restarted. The errors still show up in the logs. So as a last ditch attempt I am going to upgrade the kernel, I hate doing that!

Just a couple of days after one of my HDs started to throw up SeekComplete Errors, the second hard disk decided to follow suite. My drive setup is a bit wierd, I have some partitions that have been mirrored, and some that have been striped. All in the quest for speed.

All the data is backed up regularly into a third drive, one that has less of a work load than the other two. That makes it less likely to fail. As expected it did last a little bit longer than the other two, but the difference is less than a month!

Now all three hard drives attached to my computer complain about SeekComplete Errors. I still haven’t lost any data though (thanks to frequent CD/DVD backups) but I am left with a dilemma about what remedial actions to take.

According to the three strikes you are out rule the motherboard should be replaced (what else can cause three failures in quick successsion?). This after all isn’t even the first time i have lost HDs due to stewed motherboards. However with affordable dual core processors just around the corner, this certainly isn’t the best time to invest in a new board and processor. It’s equally obvious that buying a new IDE drive is asking for trouble.

In the end I decided to pick up a SATA II hard disk and a SATA controller card to go with it (cause the Mobo doesn’t support SATA). I have read and heard that Fedora Core has trouble with SATA devices but the Silicon Image controller that I picked up was detected without any trouble at all, same goes for the hard drive.

The only catch is that the SATA controller is only 1.5Gbps and does not support the full speed of the device. But that doesn’t matter since this is only a stop gap measure until dual core processors drop in price.