By the Power of fdisk

Ah, its been a fun weekend. First order of business was my damned cpu fan. That thing was really pissing me off. By most accounts, this fan is not the quietest fan when everyone is running off 12V, however dropping the voltage and therefore the rpm drops the noise significantly.

So I poked around in BIOS, couldn't quite figure out if I could change the voltage on that plug from there. Went online and eventually came accross that a rheostat is a handy little doodad for changing voltages. But before going too far into adding hardware, I actually found some useful ASUS docs (heaven forbid).

Once I found the Q-Fan option in BIOS, I had to enable it, reboot, and then listen as the fan whirred down to just about being innaudible. Its a wonderful thing. Now when Michael powers up, there a loud whirring of the fan powering up to the full 5,600 RPM and then as BIOS kicks in, it whirrs again but down to ~3,700 RPM. At that level, it is certainly the quietest machine in the room. After running at that level a little while, it seemed to just disappear. I can't even pick it out anymore. It's awesome.

So with confidence bolstered, I whipped out my operating system discs and gave Michael's partitions The Evil Eye. Primarily, I just wanted to steal some disc space from Windows and give it to Mandrake so I played around with Partition Magic 7 a little bit. It didn't seem to want to resize my partitions so then I had a little fun.

First, pop in the old faithful Win 98 boot disk and gave Michael a wee spot of the ole 'fdisk /mbr'. Sure boots up windows directly nice and fine, but still no resizing.

Next grab the Western Digital disk diagnostic/EZ BIOS floppy. Boot from that, disable EZ BIOS on the drive (still on there from when I tried to cram that drive in Nikita so many years ago). Reboot. Uninstall EZ BIOS. Reboot. Still no dice on the resizing.

Okay, copy everything from Michael to Dulcea for backup and fdisk the whole mofo.

Jammed Windows XP back on there. Patch, reboot, add driver, reboot, Direct X, reboot, reboot, patch, reboot, install anti virus, reboot, update anti virus, reboot, more stuff, reboot, reboot, reboot.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!! Goddamned Windows!

Install Mandrake. Hack at ypbind until the little bastard works on boot and I'm still not sure how I'm expected to set the domainname on boot so I eventually edited the functions network script to add that in there.

And now for some reason Mandrake won't laumch Firefox or Thunderbird from the shortcuts I have on my taskbar thing. I can launch them from a konsole (I feel shame), but even recreating the shortcuts doesn't help.

Whale oil beef hooked.

But its working. The usual couple of things to add in later, but I've got all my package sources sorted out so its all good.