The Blackbird Is Back, Baby
My Blackbird PC was down for a long time. Last year during Christmas break, Ivan and I tried to fix some intermittent problems that it was having. Unfortunately we made it much worse. When we replaced the power supply we got the wiring wrong and blew up all the mass storage in the system. A very sad story indeed.
To make it worse, I couldn't even recover the data from the drives. I tried ordering the same model hard drive. I got a refurb model from eBay for pretty cheap. On my first trip to Moab this winter, I stopped at Ivan's house in Ogden on the way home. We took the controller from the refurb drive and used it to replace the one on the drive that we had fried. No bueno. So there must be some other electronics, probably sealed in the drive compartment, that got fried too. Oh well. We tried.
It took a lot of time and effort but the Blackbird is back
By that time I had bought, received and set up a Dell Aurora r13 to replace the Blackbird. Since I couldn't even recover the drives, a lot of people would have just tossed out the Blackbird and moved on. But I had it for so many years, and did so many upgrades, that I couldn't bring myself to do that. I resolved to fix it. I didn't really have a use for it, but it had a lot sentimental value. And I could use the troubleshooting practice. I had been retired from IT for several years now and needed to refresh my PC technician skills.
Well the first thing was to get a replacement hard drive. I had enough points in my Alienware account after buying my Aurora (it wasn't cheap) that I got a new hard drive for points and ten bucks. Can't beat that for a deal. I managed to install the new drive and get it working with just a little fiddling. I loaded Windows but then it turned out the blu ray drive didn't work either. I was able to find a replacement drive and ordered that from Amazon. Then, just to be safe, since one of the SATA cables was severely bent, I replaced that too. After doing that, my last problem was getting the sound card working. Eventually I solved that too. Everything seemed to be working.
Of course, there is always something else. While I was updating the system and installing all the drivers, something broke in Windows. So I had to start from scratch, reinstall Windows, and then do all the updates again. But finally it all worked!
The Blackbird is back. I don't really have a use for it at the moment, but it was fun working on the problems and figuring them out. And the Blackbird still has a home.
