Computers!

(Pic unrelated)

On June 16th, a bolt of lightning struck a tree next to my house and killed my motherboard and all of our networking equipment. On June 21st, I officially declared my newly built replacement system “fully operational.”

On June 24th, I started getting strange lockups in Windows, and failure to proceed past POST. At first I thought the DVD-ROM drive was faulty, since the lockup started happening when scanning the drive list… but that was not the problem. Next I was afraid that it was the Southbridge (with its somewhat inadequate cooling) on my new Asus P5B going bad…

After quite a bit of aggravation, I found out one of my 2 Western Digital 500GB SATA drives had errors and became unmountable. Removing the drive seems to have fixed the problem. Fortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot on the drive.

Looks like I’ll be returning that one to newegg for a refund, and getting a retail drive at Yubtseb because I don’t trust Fedex.