The Shuttle Rises

A few months back, my Shuttle SN41G2 went down for the count. I wrote about it here, and moved on. However, I still had that nagging feeling that it might be sorted out with some time and sweat. While the specs are not bleeding edge: an Athlon XP 2800+ processor, 512 MB of RAM, a Plextor 740A DVDRW and a 160 GB hard drive, it is still more than usuable for everyday word processing and internet surfing.

I was always taught that when you have a series of symptoms, that there should be one diagnosis to explain them all. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch an episode of Fox's "House MD" and you'll see it firsthand. Unfortunately, I had a few problems at once that required some extra effort from this "Digital Doc."

The first thing was that the battery on the motherboard simply wore out and died. When I posted my error screen on a motherboard forum, I was given that diagnosis on a silver platter. I even had a spare at the house because my car alarm transmitter uses the same battery. However, that was only the beginning of the recovery.

I planned to reload the operating system for a fresh start. I wanted to reformat the hard drive for the clean install. For whatever reason, in an external enclosure, I couldn't reformat the hard drive with my notebook. I'm not sure why this is as I was able to access the drive, but the formatting was not to be. For the record, the notebook uses Windows XP Home, not Professional. With the hard drive mounted in the Shuttle, I couldn't reformat the drive either, using boot floppies, and boot CD's. I was finally able to reformat the drive with it mounted in the USB external enclosure, using a Windows XP Pro desktop. This still puzzles me, but at least I got the job done and could install Windows anew.

As if this wasn't enough, when I reinstalled Windows, I could not control the mouse. I had never previously had an issue with the PS/2 mouse port, so I blamed Windows, of course. I even tried a different USB wireless mouse to bypass the PS/2 to no avail. However, believe it or not, the real diagnosis was that both the PS/2 post and the USB wireless mouse were not working simultaneously. I'm still wondering why I picked up two new problems simultaneously. This is enough to make even me start searching the Dell site for a new desktop...well, almost.

With the hard drive reformatted, a new battery in the motherboard, and a functional USB mouse (to bypass the broken PS/2), we now have liftoff. I am quite happy, but have something new in mind for the Shuttle. Hmmm. Now that we have a TechNudge Linux section, I plan on using the Shuttle as a test bed for Linux. This way I can run home to Windows when I get too lost in the land of Linux. Expect to hear some more soon about some early Linux failures and successes.

--Jonas

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