So my main desktop – the one I use to render / convert video, audio, run virtual machines, write teaching materials – the one with 16GB RAM and a fast six core processor – has been intermittently hanging when it boots.
I suspected the 7-8 year old 1.5TB disk drives as it often manifests as a disk error. Loosing all your records is not a good idea, so new 3TB drives were ordered from Amazon for $80 and they came yesterday. After Senior Aides were done I started a clone of the drives, in GNU/Linux there are no special programs to buy or complicated screens to navigate it is simply a terminal command “dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096”, which ran from roughly 3pm to 10:30PM.
I put away the old drives for backup, installed the new drives, and …. nothing. Dead computer. Multiple parts swaps later, it was not the disk drives but the main board that was failing in service. So Jesus protected me long enough that I got the drives duplicated, but then let it go … au bas.
So now, I need a new main board. But kludged together enough parts by 1pm today that I have a fair working desktop in the mean time. And at least today I had coffeeeeeeee.