I had an interesting experience this weekend. I bought some Fedora 9 CDs in order to easily upgrade a new laptop. Since I had them, I decided to upgrade one of my desktops from a CD rather than over the net (I usually install over the net, but, sadly but understandably, installing from CD tends to have a fewer glitches). So I pushed the button on my CD-ROM drive to open the holder. I heard a grinding noise, and the holder didn’t come out. I pried it out with a jack-knife, but, predictably, it then wouldn’t go back in. I removed the drive and opened it up, and a couple of pieces fell out. I have no skill with hardware, so my chances of repairing it were zero.<\/p>\n
This particular desktop, about four years old, happened to be my newest one. However, I have several other desktops in various states of disrepair, so I figured I would just swap in a new CD-ROM drive. After 90 minutes of unscrewing various computers, I discovered that I now have four broken CD-ROM drives and zero working ones. Three of the CD-ROM drives didn’t open. The fourth one worked well enough to boot Fedora, but failed as soon as I tried to read the whole disk.<\/p>\n
This is just another lesson in why computers should have no moving parts. I’ve ordered a refurbished CD-ROM drive for $10, plus $8 shipping. I’ll see whether the cheap approach works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had an interesting experience this weekend. I bought some Fedora 9 CDs in order to easily upgrade a new laptop. Since I had them, I decided to upgrade one of my desktops from a CD rather than over the net (I usually install over the net, but, sadly but understandably, installing from CD tends […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}