Coming Home

All the worrying was not misplaced, some things went well, but others did not.

I finally got Gemini home a couple of weeks ago. CoolIT Systems had her in the shop for about two or three weeks before they finally got to her. They worked on her for a few days and then I got a phone call at work.

The good news was they replaced the whole cooling systems with a new one. They no longer make the WS240, so they replaced it with a couple of ECO units. This is a cooling pump on each CPU, and they are both routed to a 2 x 240 radiator the same as before.

The bad news is that they pulled the motherboard without calling me first. Even though I had said several times in e-mail "don't pull the motherboard without calling me" they went ahead anyway and did it. The problem is they just disconnected all the cables without thinking about how they were going to connect them back. In retrospect I should have taped a note to the side of the chassis -- don't pull the motherboard without calling me.

Most of the cables I did not care about, but there were five cables that connect the disk array to the motherboard - those had to be in the right order. At first I was just in shock, how would I ever get my disk array working again. I had spent six and a half days RIPing my music collection of CDs to my disk, and I did not want to have to do that again.

Now you may be asking why I didn't back up my disk. Well, because it's a RAID 5 array and it's supposed to be reliable. Any one disk can fail and the array will continue to operate. You can replace the failed disk and the array will rebuild itself. Also, I do back up the boot partition, but my music collection is not on the boot partition because the CDs themselves are the backup.

When I got to thinking straight I realized that I had connected the drives in a specific order, and there were really only 4 different combinations I would have chosen. I explained this to CoolIT and they said they would try to get it running again. A couple of days later they said they had it running again and I was able to breath a deep sigh of relief. They packed up the system and shipped it back to me, and it got to me Tuesday, May 4.

When I got Gemini out of the box and onto the dining room table I took off the side panel to inspect the job. The cooling system looked OK, but I was surprised how they rewired everything. The fan wiring did not make sense to me, but it must have worked at one point because they said they tested the system. Also, two of the chassis fans were not connected to anything. The audio cable from the front of the chassis was connected to a fan header - I don't know what they were thinking - and a few cables were not connected to anything because they could not figure out where the connections went.

It did not take much effort to fix all the connections and I powered up the system a couple of times just to make sure all the fans were running. Then I put the side panel back on and took Gemini upstairs back to her nest in my office. She's the biggest thing in the nest mind you.

When I started her up fully for the first time there were three strange beeps after the Power On Self Test (POST) but then Windows started booting and everything seemed OK. However, Windows was unusually sluggish for some reason. I then rebooted Gemini from the Intel Deployment CD to run the RAID utilities. It appeared that they had not actually connected the disks back in the right order, but it seems the RAID system didn't really care, it just figured out which disk was which and carried on. It seems that it had to spend a little time rebuilding things, which may explain why the system performance was slow for a while, but after a while everything was fine again.

A few days latter I was curious about the new three beeps every time I started the system so I went back to the Intel manual. Evidently they were telling me there was a memory error. I checked the system properties and sure enough the system could only see 10 GB of the 12 GB of RAM I had installed. After closer inspection of the motherboard I could see a tiny LED that was on in a row of 6 LEDs. According to the Intel manual that indicated which memory module was at fault. I pulled the module and reseated it carefully, powered on the system, and all was well again.

Since then Gemini has not been giving me any problems - consequently I'm in a much better frame of mind - and I feel like I've learn a bunch of new things I did not know before.

I don't think CoolIT were incompetent or anything. I knew ahead of time they were busy and even though they told me they did not do this kind of custom work any more, they took responsibility to address a product they sold me that was failing. I deliberately did not put any pressure on them to hurry, but after the third inquiry in three weeks I think they panicked a little to get going and were just too enthusiastic about getting things done. To their credit they also took responsibility to resolve the problems they had created. I would certainly do business with them again.

A happy little side note: I ran the Window System Rating utility and for some reason my Graphics is running faster than before: 7.5 instead of 7.1. I think this is probably because I updated the ATI drivers right before I sent Gemini away for repair.