Getting Tim Back Up
So, I finally got ‘Tim’ back up and running this week. Man, what a trip down memory lane that turned into, mostly frustrating though if I’m being honest.
You know ‘Tim’, right? That old file server I built ages ago. It’s not really mission-critical anymore, hasn’t been for years. But it holds a bunch of ancient project files, photos, just stuff. Sentimental value, I guess. Decided I wanted to pull some old photos off it for my kid.
The Process, Oh Boy…
First off, plugging it in. Nothing. Dead silence. Okay, power supply maybe? Dug around in my box-o-cables, found a tester. PSU was fine. Strange.
Cracked the case open. Dust bunnies the size of actual bunnies. Cleaned that mess out. Reseated the RAM, checked the connections. Still nothing. No POST beep, no flicker on the screen. Motherboard dead? Ugh.
Remembered I had a similar-era board stashed in the attic. Spent half a Saturday up there, sneezing my head off. Found it. Swapped it in. Different problem now. It powers up, but complains about the boot drive.
Okay, progress? Pulled the old IDE hard drive. Connected it to my main machine using one of those USB adapter things. Click-click-whirr. Oh no. That’s the sound of death for a hard drive.
Why Bother?
Honestly, at this point, any sane person would’ve given up. It’s just old photos, right? But it reminded me of when I first built that server. Was just starting out, really proud of putting it together myself. Felt like giving up on it was like… admitting defeat on that younger version of me? Sounds silly, I know.
My wife came in, saw the pile of parts. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Wrestling with ghosts,” I told her. She just shook her head and left me to it. She knows how I get.
The Fix (Sort Of)
Found another old IDE drive. Low capacity, but whatever. Needed to get an OS on it. Remembered Tim ran some ancient Linux distro. Finding that ISO was another adventure. Burned it to a CD. Yes, a CD! Felt like an archaeologist.
- Installed the basic OS.
- Tried mounting the dying drive again. Still clicking, but the OS saw it intermittently!
- Started copying stuff over network cable. Painfully slow. Took hours. Lots of errors.
- Managed to get maybe 70% of the important directories copied before the old drive gave up completely.
So, Tim is ‘back’. Kinda. It runs, it has most of the old stuff. But it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of old and slightly-less-old parts. Was it worth it? Probably not in terms of time spent versus data recovered. But hey, I didn’t let the pile of junk win. Sometimes that’s enough.
