So, tonight I got some more parts … and ran into more problems. I found some M2A-VM motherboards at work today and bought them for ~$45/each. I got two. My thought was, I could use one in the server and have a backup in case anything ever happened.
I got the miniSAS to SATA cables in today as well. I put together the M2A-VM in the server case and found out … the only PCI-E slot was located where there was no slot in the backplane. My raid controller is a PCI-E x8 slot. So, that plan failed. I ended up deciding to pull my motherboard out of my main desktop machine. It’s an Intel Q6600 with 4GB of DDR2-800 on a P5K~ something motherboard (it has built-in wifi). It USED to have Vista … Eventually, I will re-install Windows XP.
As I was putting together the screws in the hard drive carriers, I removed the tubs (removed 2 screws) and went to install the hard drives. I put the two screws in from the tubs, but the other screws that came with the case had some sort of “tite-lock” or something similar. So, they would get between 1 and 1.5 turns before they locked up –nowhere near flush (like they were supposed to be). I resorted to using only 2 screws.
So I installed all 8 of the 750GB hard drives in a raid 10 for the media storage array. I then added two more hard drives for the root files system. I had an 80GB SATA hard drive and I “borrowed” Chris’ 500GB SATA hard drive in order to make the root file system a raid 1.
I then went to install the OS (Fedora 9, x86_64), but the two copies of the install DVDs were both scratched .. or at least neither worked. Sooooo …. I’m downloading a new copy of it. Meanwhile, the long awaited server sits put together (minus the extender for the front-panel connector), but … no OS.
