the case of the antec sonata case
I have decided to blame my fiancé for the latest batch of hardware problems I
found myself in. He had complained that the two computers in my room are too
loud and makes it impossible to sleep.
He is sort of right, the desktop has an Nvidia graphics card with an extremely
large and loud fan, plus a cheap noisy case fan, plus the power supply fan. As
loud as it is, I have grown quite used to it and generally have music on when I
fall asleep so don't notice it so much. I also have a server, but that has no
fancy video card, only a somewhat noisy power supply.
I now have two
Antec
Sonata II cases.
They are black and very heavy, solid looking things and quite nice and shiny. I
decided to not think about what was going on and rush right in to swapping the
cases. Shouldn't be a problem. I have in the old case 3 hard drives and one DVD
writer all on the IDE channels. I hauled them all out and put the motherboard
into the new case. Then I realized that I had forgot to take note of which
drive was a master or slave and what channel of the IDE bus it was on.
There was also another minor issue. The case is set up such that the hard
drives are perpendicular to the DVDRW drive, that is, facing you when you open
the door. Because I am using all 4 IDE channels I have to make one of the hard
drives live on the same cable as the DVDRW. The problem is that the distance
between the DVDRW and the hard drive is too far for any of the standard cables
IDE cables to reach. The solution was buying a SATA drive and reinstalling the
OS on that. Not much of a solution I know.
I had a couple of versions of Debian sitting around but for the life of me
couldn't get them installed, every time either the GRUB installation would fail
or some file on the installer was deemed corrupt. It turns out that my laptop's
DVD/CDRW combo drive is on its way to a certain death. It took me ages to
figure this out as I was convinced it something I was doing wrong with all this
new hardware.
Anyway I am now fully re-installed and everything seems ok. The case
is
**really** quiet but now he is complaining that the little blue neon
lights on he front are too bright.....grr..