Say goodbye to my faithful workstation that has served me for a good 5 or so years. About a year ago it started giving me boot issues, would lock up with some regularity and was just ornary. Well, today was the final straw. I ripped it out of my rack and removed the hard drive. Slapped that in my the spare rack server I had over here for backup purposes and went at it.

Arch did not want to boot because it could not find the hard drive. Luckily there was a failsafe image on there. I suspect the regular arch image was tailored to the old hardware so the initrd system did not have the proper modules. Couple this with some knowledge of grub and I was golden.

This system has an ATI Rage XL and getting that configured and using something other than 800×600 was a chore. It made me realize I have no desire to use ati cards in the near future. While people may complain about nvidia, and I used the open nv driver, they work a hell of a lot better than any ATI card I have ever tried.

The biggest problem, though, were the four fans in this thing. The old Compaq server I had sounded like a jet taking off. This damn box sounds like a whole squadron. Did they have to make the fans so loud?

The horror, the horror.

Well Arch is running and I am back into my fluxbox. Hooray!