I swear, computers and I do not get along.

I’ve been having some problems with my desktop recently, mainly random lock-ups with no reason for it recorded to my logs. I thought perhaps I simply had filesystem problems and I was taking care of them as they arose. This weekend though, things came to a head.

I borrowed a hard drive from Tim to do backups, slapped it in and booted a Knoppix disk to do to the copying. Things started out okay, but invariably, Knoppix would freeze during the transfer. Long story short, I’m fairly sure the onboard IDE controller is dying.

“No problem.” I think. I have a PCI IDE controller that I use for spare drives. I can throw the 2 devices that were using the onboard IDE (my boot disk and CDROM drive) onto it and things should work just fine. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu installers and Knoppix refused to boot when the CDROM was plugged into the PCI controller.

While mucking around in my BIOS, I found a couple other solutions I could try.

I followed Tim’s instructions on how to make a USB installer for Ubuntu tested it on a known good machine and fired it up. My computer refused to boot from it though. I wasn’t too surprised by that, when I built it, USB flash disks weren’t too prevalent and I was shocked simply to see that it claimed to support it.

So, we switched over to the network install. I enabled that on the computer and had Tim set up the server side of things (since he network boots one of his machines already) and managed to get the installer to start. It dies shortly into its boot. Half an hour of tweaking boot options later, I simply give up.

A new motherboard is on its way from Newegg. Sadly, this means tearing apart the computer to install it. I’ve got to do it though… I have no idea how people manage to use a laptop for their primary computer.

So, when I arrived home today to discover that my DSL still wasn’t working, I called at&t. 40 minutes later, I had a technician appointment and left for work, leaving my cell phone number.

Fortunately for me, I work for a company that does DSL (just not to my apartment), so I grabbed our Sunset and headed out to the dmark box outside my apartment building. Guess what: it worked.

Hoping to spare myself the expense of having at&t tell me what was wrong, I then went up to my apartment and started testing jacks, finally finding one it would sync on. After promptly calling and cancelling my appointment, Peter and I went searching for answers, and found them in the “DSL” box. Whoever was kind enough to wire the apartment had filtered all of the jacks but one. DSL obviously doesn’t work on a filtered jack.

So, after a run to Taco Bell, we fixed the wiring, labeled things and put together my internet.

Thank goodness that’s done.