BobsYourUncle
Surrey, BC Canada
Senior Member
Joined: 12/12/2003
View Profile
 Offline
|
It has been quite a few months since my webserver committed suicide! It was and old Pentium III-800 and the motherboard croaked.
I have been soooo busy I never had time to build a new one. One of the biggest issues is re-using the hard drive without having to re-install everything. If I had to do that, I would have had to learn how to set up the website all over again. I just didn't feel like it. The old thing was running Windows 2000. Gives you an idea how long its been since I built my website!
Yesterday I tried several old motherboads and a couple newer ones that I had kicking around here. All of them presented me with a BSOD - innaccessible boot device. They all had a different chipset, so the hardware drivers caused it to crash while booting because the HD is in a different computer and the hardware is not the same.
So I managed to find an old motherboard with the same brand chipset (VIA) and put together the system with that. It let me boot up in Safe mode. So I went in and deleted all the hardware settings from the system properties, rebooted, re-installed drivers for the current hardware and yahoo! It worked. Great! Free motherboard from a friend 
Anyhow, my old carcass of a TT - my 1981 Citation Rebuild - Picture Horror Story is back up and running again.  I know a lot of you are familiar with my "project" I have had a lot of inquiries as to what happened to my website.
Now it's running off an AMD Athlon XP 2200. Hope this one lasts a while . . . . .
Happy happy
2007 GMC 3500 dually ext. cab 4X4 LBZ
Duramax / Allison
Fire Red
95 Sportsmen 25.5' TT
81 Citation 25' "Tail dragger" "Under construction"
"Workin' man's rig"
Bob's Trucks
Check Out My Rebuild Project *** Website Finally Back Up Nov. 6/09 ***
Project Feedback
|
Gene&Ginny
North Kingstown, RI
Senior Member
Joined: 03/16/2004
View Profile
Offline
|
I, for one, am glad to see your server back up. That is one fantastic job of rebuilding you did.
Gene and DW Ginny
2008 Toyota 4Runner 4.7L V8 w/factory towing option
2002 Sunline Solaris Lite T2363
Reese Dual Cam Straight Line HP Sway Control
|
BobsYourUncle
Surrey, BC Canada
Senior Member
Joined: 12/12/2003
View Profile
Offline
|
Gene&Ginny wrote:I, for one, am glad to see your server back up. That is one fantastic job of rebuilding you did.
Thank you! I appreciate the comment. Glad that one of you is happy to see the site back up again. It's been down for several months.
|
1492
Virginia, USA
Senior Member
Joined: 04/08/2005
View Profile
|
I know exactly what you went through! It can be a real task to upgrade to a different motherboard using an existing Windows OS install. I've done it quite a few times, but always with varying issues to fix. I use the forced driver reinstall method outlined by Microsoft, and have always been successful in booting into the new motherboard the first time. No BSOD. But then you must reinstall all service packs and updates. There are numerous methods on the net for upgrading motherboards, but haven't found any that were particularly easy or pleasant for that matter.
|
BobsYourUncle
Surrey, BC Canada
Senior Member
Joined: 12/12/2003
View Profile
Offline
|
1492 wrote:I know exactly what you went through! It can be a real task to upgrade to a different motherboard using an existing Windows OS install. I've done it quite a few times, but always with varying issues to fix. I use the forced driver reinstall method outlined by Microsoft, and have always been successful in booting into the new motherboard the first time. No BSOD. But then you must reinstall all service packs and updates. There are numerous methods on the net for upgrading motherboards, but haven't found any that were particularly easy or pleasant for that matter.
I have done this many times and find the single biggest hurdle is the chipset. Nothing will BSOD faster than a different chipset. In many that I have managed to salvage without a complete re-install, I have launched the old HD with a board with a similar chipset.
I didn't outline my whole process because it is simply too boring for most of us. But one thing I tried once I closely matched the chipset and got it booted up was to remove that board AFTER I dumped ALL the drivers etc. from the system properties. I then put in a much newer faster board and CPU but with a different chipset and it still gave me a BSOD. So rather than continue to try for a newer board and CPU, I opted to use the one that worked. Its old, but not that old, and certainly not as old as the PIII-800 that died.
I still have an original untouched HD to play with, as I was running a mirror RAID. I only used one HD to get it going again. Now that it is up I can bang together a nice newer system with SATA and all that. Then I can play with getting it up and running with all newer hardware and when that's done I'll mirror a couple SATA drives and dump all my old IDE stuff. For fun I'll see if I can make it go on XP instead of the current Win2K.
I'm actually planning on completely re-writing my whole website. That would be a good time to do it. The original was done with MS Frontpage, an easy to use but very proprietary program. Getting my links to work in anything but IE was a real pain.
|
|
|
