Computer Techie Toolbox Round-Up:

Computer Techie Toolbox Round-Up:

After about a couple of years with little work to do, I've built and refurbished a few computers in the past few months.

Again, better than MacGyver's

Dispensable spare parts
For instance, I used a Pentium 3 to boot a Phenom with a broken pin

1. Scissors
2. Wide plyer/wirestripper
3. Pointed plyer
4. Wide Philips/flat screwdrivers
5. Magnifying glass
6. Multitool pocketknife
7. The screwdriver that comes with Noctua SE fans
8. Multi-bit screwdriver

Mini screwdriver set for repairing and cleaning laptops.

Assortment of parts: (Label the boxes!)

1. Screws, sorted!
2. Pins
3. USB sticks (I like to keep special purpose USB sticks separate and labeled)
4. Flash RAM
5. Small cables (CrossFire/SLI,molex adapters)
6. Stickers
7. Misc++

Toolbox:

1. Pens
2. CPU cooling paste
3. Glue
4. Tape
5. Antistatic wristband
6. Q-tips
7. Other tools!

A straight fan can improve RPM

Keep your rescue and OS disks sorted!

1. Retail Diagnostic CD's
2. Retail Driver CD's
3. Your own accumulated custom driver compilations
4. Windows/Linux OS CD's
5. Live distros
6. Rescue distros
7. Forensic distros

Sunsway/ST Lab PCI ATA133 2P SATA-PATA cards

Updated:  May 10th 2012

This is a PCI card that basically has two IDE ports. You can upgrade the BIOS on the card and get a Medley RAID controller feature, which will give you RAID modes 0,1 and 10.

While I was experimenting with some faulty hardware, power to one of the 4 disks in the RAID must have failed, and while the disk was not missing from the Set, per se, something had happened to it.

And lo and behold, their driver software delivers (Silicon Image Software). It rebuilt two disks that had problems. While the rebuild took place, Windows complained about a faulty hard disk presemt.

Various stages during RAID rebuild

Various stages during RAID rebuild

Good drivers !

Ultimate Boot CD

UBCD is perfect when you just installed the newest Ubuntu with GRUB2, which happily kills all other Linux partition MBR's and installs it self as the sole booting OS. It doesn't even try to detect GRUB partitions! This is absurd. With this console-based CD you can fix most partition woes, but I was not able to restore Linux partitions on logical partitions. I had the following partition setup:

UBCD Homepage: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

sda1 (Primary, bootable) WinXP
sda2 (Extended)
sda5 (Logic) Slackware
sda8 (Logic)Windows 7
sda6 (Logic, bootable (on an extended partition??)Ubuntu 8.04
sda7 (Logic)Linux Swap

After I installed Ubuntu 11.04 it suddenly had shifted some partitions up one step and created a new unused partition, even no resizing or partition changes where made in the installer other than setting sda6 as home partition.

sda1 (Primary, bootable) WinXP
sda2 (Extended)
sda4 (Logic)Unused Partition
sda5 (Logic)Ubuntu 11.04
sda6 (Logic)Windows 7
sda7 (Logic, bootable)Ubuntu 8.04
sda8 (Logic)Linux Swap

Later I tried to install Linux Mint 5 (based on Ubuntu 8.04) over 11.04 to get a new GRUB, but to no avail. (It thinks the partitions are invalid).

Also tried Testdisk to restore MBR from backup sectors, but that made all partition unreadable. So I had to revert.

So I am stuck booting into Windows via UBCD's Super GRUB Disk. If I try to boot into a Linux partition I get 'unbootable partition', I can only boot into Windows 7's bootloader, wich happily let's me boot into XP too.

If anyone has ideas about what is wrong, please comment.