So, dear reader[12], you may have noticed that it’s been a month since the last update in my $HOME rebuild, and may be wondering what’s going on. I have had ongoing issues, so here is the summary, broken down per-machine…

home server

Disk failures (Dec23) which led to a new disk, and rebuild. Ongoing issues led to cannibalisation of my home desktop to provide parts (case/mobo/cpu/ram) and reinstall the server from scratch. I still am getting issues if I push the drives too hard, but is now usable for my home server use.

home desktop

…was cannibalised for the server, and so I started using my iMac for desktop use…

iMac

Stopped returning from sleep mode reliably (would instead power up all fans to max without giving me monitor) for a few days before then failing to power up properly at all. (no power chime, disk activity or monitor,  but I’d get the power LED pulsing, and after a minute or so, fans at full speed…

so I decided it was time to build a new desktop!

new home desktop

Using the case from the server, I bought a new mobo/cpu/ram/SSD HD combo. However, the mobo does not recognise my PCI-E video card (power to the PCI-E slot on a microATX?) … so until that is resolved a little better, it’s sitting awaiting attention.

I can, in theory, use the onboard video, but then I have a shiny external card (with its own RAM) that goes unused…

iPhones

Yeah, seriously, my phone(s) gets to play too.

Vodafone offered me a new phone at a great deal, and I accepted. They sent it through along with the new SIM it needs. I got it, but the SIM wasn’t in the package. I went to the vodafone shop, and they gave me a new SIM and activated it for me… uh oh

This made my old phone not work, and I’m not wanting to use the new phone till I can backup the current state of the old phone, and then restore it to the new one. But I can’t do that, because iMac.

Technically, the new phone works and gets on the network – and I could start using it.

…But I suspect that if I do that (eg, receive SMSs), then I have a discontinuity of use between the old one and the new one that will cause issues later on. ie, when I eventually backup the old and restore it to the new, then I’ll lose any history in my ‘new’ use. I’d rather a clean changeover (and I do not want to use “someone else’s computer” (aka: iCloud) for this), so until I have a functioning and up-to-date iTunes, I can’t use my new phone, and the activated SIM means I can’t use my old phone either…

Powerbook G4

So, I pull out my old Powerbook G4, which has a broken Ubuntu install on it. One OSX disk later, and it’s back to a clean Tiger install. But research suggests that for the iPhone 4s, I need the latest iTunes, and that it will only run on Leopard. Leopard will run on the G4, I just need a install disk. The one I have wasn’t liked by the Powerbook’s combo drive (as I recall), but I decide to test it anyway…

Putting the disk into the drive = system crash!

The disk didn’t even spin up before the system crashed totally, and now nothing will eject the disk (not even open firmware), and the system profiler says that I no longer have an optical drive attached (maybe something in hardware died, and that would explain the crash)

So…

tl;dr

• server: been rebuilt, is OK if I don’t stress the filesystems…
• linux desktop: been rebuilt, I can proceed forward if I use the onboard video… and if nothing else goes wrong…
• iMac desktop: power issues of some form, so goodbye iTunes there…
• iPhone 3Gs: old one has a deactivated SIM, but I can’t back it up without iTunes somewhere…
• iPhone 4s: works, but I’m unwilling to start using it until I can restore contacts, SMS, etc, from the old one, and so have a clean changeover.
• Powerbook laptop: optical drive failure, so cannot get a Leopard install to get iTunes…

PS: I had a windows desktop machine too… it blew a power supply a couple of months ago, so hasn’t been included in this 6 weeks of hell summary

Next step?

Well, I have been saying for a while that I need a new media center/HTPC, and I wasn’t thinking about building up something from scratch… sometime later this year.  I’ve also thought for a while that for my occasional Mac usage, moving to an Intel Mac was likely to happen, though I’d not seen any great need as yet. But now I’m toying with the idea of killing two birds with one stone, and buying a mac mini. It’ll run xmbc/boxee, and also solve my iTunes dilemma. It wont be a third monitor in my computer room any more, but I guess I can deal with that…

[12] deliberately non-plural