Well I decided to move the hardware out of the old case and into the new one. Bad move.

The 5 hard drives, being PATA, cannot be connected up if the cage is correctly fitted as the cables are not long enough. Plus you cannot put the side panel back on, even if the data cables did fit, as the power cables stick out in the way.

I’ll have to wait till I replace all the drives with SATA ones before I can fit the cage properly. It’s sitting on its side at the moment, not exactly secure.

The next problem I had was that when powering up, the PC didn’t want to boot off the system drive, it was trying a completely different one. I had made damn sure I put the drives back in the right order, and connected them all up to the same channels they had before. But something went wrong. So I had to try to work out which drive was the system drive and change in the BIOS which one it was.

Then I made my next mistake. I got confused which network port was supposed to be in use. I have one on the motherboard itself, and a separate NIC. I could not remember which one I’d taken the ethernet cable out of. I wrongly assumed it was the separate NIC, and for some reason that’s beyond me I disabled the onboard one in the BIOS.

Now I’m waiting for the damn thing to finish “applying computer settings” so I can shut it straight back down again and re-enable the onboard NIC. It really does take an incredibly ridiculously long time to start up and shut down. It drives me mad if I ever have to reboot it for some reason.

I presume that it being Small Business Server 2003 might have a small part to play, I’m sure plain old Server 2003 would run a hell of a lot faster. Maybe when I upgrade the drives I’ll actually reinstall the operating system at the same time. I really don’t need to have SBS, just Server and Exchange.

I wonder if it’s actually finished booting yet… what’s the betting it hasn’t?

UPDATE: What a surprise, it hadn’t. I ended up going to bed and checking it first thing in the morning. It was sitting on the login screen at 7am, and unfortunately since I had to go to work there was nothing more I could do. It still won’t respond to pings so I have no clue what IP settings it’s trying to use (if any). It’ll have to wait till I get off work. *le sigh*