Embarrassing, I hurried my soldering on the last repair and left a little bit of stray wire, which I think touched the case of the adjacent power socket. I didnt make a proper job, didnt secure it and it slowly dropped under its own weight... Well it shorted out and tripped the power supply but I've now fixed the fault, and the PSU resets itself and is running again.

This is just the tip of the cosmic helium berg that chose my life to tear the hulls out of. Grrr...

The whole story

It began with a power outage, and when it was restored my Athlon X2 motherboard was toasted by a spike. I threw everything I knew at it, and managed to get it through the POST once, and that was it. Then it refused to boot, and the drive light locked on with no BIOS output. Since it does half-work with no drives plugged in I'm guessing its not the BIOS at fault. I cant be bothered to grub it out of there and solder in a new one anyway. I swore, profusely, and tried to boot the mill's motherboard. I haven't used that in two years or more as the development is on my Athlon, so I was only marginally more annoyed that didn't work. I gave it up as a bad job and didn't bother. I thought I was doing well until then.

First and last time I saw this. Why I took a picture I dont know.

I tried my Raspberry Pi B, hooked up a HDMI cable and booted that, but its fitted with a 3.2" touchscreen and the video modules are patched to output to that. I still didn't have any proper browsing, HaD wouldn't work as the screen was too small. I managed to post in messages that I was down and tried to unpatch the video, and broke it. Joy...

Next I dug out an Acer laptop I'd been given for spares and tried to fix that unsuccessfully, then a Compaq NX series using bits from the Acer, and a USB-SATA adapter for the DVD. I managed to boot that with a Live DVD and tried Hackaday again...

Big mistake. The code for the page made so many referrals to the CD it took more than an hour to load, and then a script gave up and it fell over. Wow, why is that so huge? I hadn't noticed running on a decent system. Mind you, it is a Turion1.6GHz. I tried to install Mint Sarah on it as its all I had laying around, and the install failed. I was a bit annoyed by then, I can tell you.

I dug out the remains of an Advent Modena and wondered. I had to find it memory and solder on a power supply to bypass the missing battery and broken power socket, hardwire the network, use a big external monitor and a USB keyboard and mouse just to get that to POST.

Then I used the Compaq to copy the Live CD to it's internal drive as an ISO, then I imaged that onto another SATA drive using the thumbdrive writer app in Mint, then booted it on the SATA-USB and installed it to the internal drive before putting it into the Advent so it ran. The Advent wouldn't boot the DVD off the USB for some reason so it became the target system for the repair.

I wouldnt have had to do any of that if HaD ran on a mobile phone, or had an app... Or ran on a piece of sh*t Turion, or on any system with a Live DVD - which is really in the spirit of hacking. I mean, HaD looks nice, but it doesn't work so well unless you have a good system. A little exclusive there. ;-P