On our last episode I was describing the death of my bread and butter server on which I do all of my coding. It was after 3:00 AM Friday morning and I didn't have a plan on what I was going to do, only that I needed to do something fast.
Shortly after 8:00 that morning I decided to reload Windows 2003 Server to see if I could learn anything. I left the office after starting the drive format and upon returning saw "Windows 2003 Server cannot format this drive." Good enough. That message along with the disk error I got the first time I tried to reboot after blue screening made me think that my hard drive must have gone bad. A quick trip to Circuit City for a $79 160GB drive and reinstall. Success!!! Since yesterday morning the machine has been running sweetly.
More accurately, my resurrected server is running fantastic. There was so much crap on there. Old SharePoint bits that have long-since died and .NET 2.0 Beta dlls just for starters. Who knows what else was crapping up the machine over the last 2 or 3 years that I've been working on it.
With that in mind, I decided to install ONLY what I needed to do my work, so I installed, in order listed
- Windows 2003 Server SP1
- SQL Server 2005
- Visual Studio 2005
- Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (and YES, after the clean system wipe it installed without a hitch. I'm real happy to be using the VS2005 SP1 now, by the way. I could tell right away that improvements have been made.)
- TextPad
- SnagIt
- Photoshop 7.0 (I have CS, but it's bloatware that I don't need. Plus it requires activation.)
- And that's it. Nothing else.
Things I did not install
- Microsoft Office
- Adobe Reader (to create PDFs. I have it running on another machine I can use. One less Adobe product in my life.)
- SQL Server 2000
- Visual Studio 2003
- Windows Sharepoint Services (thank god I don't work with it anymore.)
I'll be installing a few other developer-type apps (CodeSmith comes to mind, for instance), but I'm going to do my best to keep it as clean as possible.
I always rename a server after I repave it. Last time I repaved a server, it's name of "Farley" became "Gnomer." This machine was "Drastic," but is now "Hermsey." Long live Hermsey!
The first web site I set up on Hermsey was CS21Demo, which I use for CS hacking, DBVTCS21 was next, then a couple of client project sites. I've got so many sites and databases that I don't have to look at anymore, which is another good outcome from repaving a machine. I'll want to get my archived DBVT sites back online, but there's no hurry on that.
So I'm back in business and better than ever. A fresh repaving does a machine good. And since all of my data was on a second physical drive, I didn't lose anything.
Here are a few screenshots of the death. First, the blue screen, then the first thing I saw on reboot, then the message that prompted me to install a new hard drive.
Life is good in Vermont once again. A sincere thanks to those of you who said kind things and were feeling my pain.
