VE7IHL/VE7VBS gets a Hard Drive Upgrade!

With the old trusty 420MB WD IDE hard drive starting to get noisy, and almost full, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade the packet machine's hard drive to a nice, new 4.3G WD EIDE drive. Well, after more than 8 hours of work re-installing the new Linux Slackware 3.5 OS and transferring over all the Linux packet application software, it all seemed to be humming along quite nicely. The next day in the morning I came into the ham shack to check on things. I noticed that the packet machine was making little squeaky sounds. I decide to re-boot the machine. That was it. It would no longer boot; the new 4.3G hard drive was toast! I take out the 4.3G hard drive, go back to the store to get a replacement, but they have no more 4.3G drives, so I pay the difference and go to a 6.4G WD drive. Back home, reinstall the new hard drive, spent about 6 hours reinstalling the Slackware Linux 3.5 OS and packet application software. (I am now getting faster at this... take a mental note: don't erase the old 420M drive for a while!) This time, all seems well, as the new 6.4G drive has now been fine running for months.

Learn a lesson here! Backup your hard drive data! Do it NOW!

Why does this happen to me?

After the hard drive problems you think I would leave well enough alone, but not so! You would think working on PC's for over 10+ years, that things would get easier. Anyway, I decided to upgrade the network card in the ve7ihl/ve7vbs packet machine to a faster PCI model, re