Do you still have your first computer? Your first laptop? As years go by we tend to accumulate a lot of old hardware which, at least in our mind, hold some value, at least a sentimental one. Yes, I still have my first laptop but I also have many generations of hardware of all types in between. How can I throw away that server which I used for 3 years, it must be still usable somehow! If I run that many things on it a few years ago surely it will be able to run something again sometime. Actually the truth is that as years go by most of the old hardware becomes nothing more than junk taking up space. I “recycled” many old computers and servers as Linux desktops for friends, my mom and even my mom friends for basic tasks such as internet and word processing but at some point after a number of years it is harder and harder to bring back to life these old machines.
This week I tried to “recycle” an old machine which was used as application server for many years but was replaced 3 years ago. It was catching dust in a corner but in my mind it was still a good machine able to run a small web server. Bringing it to live proved more difficult than expected. First, one of the hard-drives was missing. It was easy to find another ATA HDD, even not the same size, since most of the old hardware I have used one. Then the boot question came up, can it boot an USB stick? But before this the BIOS seemed corrupted. I replaced the battery, and still nothing. Can I flash the bios? Finding a floppy drive seemed feasible however finding a floppy disk and another computer with a floppy drive to write the floppy disk seemed much harder. It might also be work in vain if a capacitor is broken. I did not gave up and quickly found a replacement board. It was even a bit newer so better. However this had no memory and at first my search revealed a stack of memories of 3 different types none of which fitted. I don’t even know which one was which (SDRAM, DDRAM1, 2?). Searching the old computers again I managed to find a burned board with the appropriate type and 3 working dimms of 128, 128 and 256. Victory. I replaced the board (to use the nice Antec case and source from the old server), fitted the memory, the 2 HDD’s (for soft raid) and installed linux from usb (I was prepared even for a Lan install). In the end I ended up with a nice “recycled” server to run.
It felt good to see the leds blinking and hear the fans spinning again but what about the rest of the old hardware I took parts from or which lies in all our closets? Will it be ever reused or it’s just junk taking up space?
BIOS CRC error