Don't try this with Windows - a short tale of woe with a happy ending
Today I had an interesting experience - I managed to fry/toast/bork the CPU in my main Linux (web, mail, ftp, owl, teamspeak, etc) server; and now the rest of the story... Early this morning the CPU fan in the main server started making a hell of a racket. Note that this was Thermaltake ORB fan. Sounds like the bearings were going. Since I had an older, working fan available I decided to replace it. Used a small amount of heatsink paste and mounted it. Wiggled it a bit to be sure it was connected securely. Buttoned the box back up and turned it on.Just a little background hum - not too bad at all. A few minutes later I hear a loud Clunk followed immediately by a smell we all know and hate - burnt electronic widget. Oh oh. I use my KVM to switch over to that system - nothing - dead - pitch black.
This isn't good, but hmmm, maybe the hard drives are ok. I put the hard drives in another (spare) system and use my Linux rescue CD to examine them - they look fine. Good news indeed. So I start pulling the hardware from the old system (video card, Network card, etc) and putting the pieces in the replacement system. Taking care to mount the hard drives in the same configuration they enjoyed in the orginal box.
Time to test it; fired it up - tries to boot from the floppy and from the network card. Bleah. Ok disable the floppy in the BIOS, reset the PNP configuration while I am there.
Boot again. Some luck. Starts to boot. Hmmm network doesn't appear to be coming up. Shutdown. Examine the box again - Ahhh Ha! There was already a network card in the box. Extracted it.
Boot again. All is well. Web and Mail servers are up, as is my Spam Filtering system. Whoo Hooo.
Now here is the interesting part. The old system was an AMD Athlon while the new system is an Intel. Want to try this with windows? It wont work, Windows would force you to reinstall EVERYTHING.
Linux Rocks
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