Anything Worth Doing

Is apparently worth doing at the last minute...

daisy_knotwise and I have submitted our Pegasus Nominating ballots with one hour to spare.

This is the same spare hour that you have, should you be awake and reading this. :)

Screwed!

I wanted to check on one last Cubase feature tonight before the workshop at Musecon this weekend. Since the portable gear is all packed up, I figured I'd go down, boot up the d8b, and look at things there.

This would have been a great plan if the d8b had booted up. The CMOS had lost the BIOS settings, indicating that the backup battery in the CPU was dead. And of course, we didn't have another battery in the house. I asked Gretchen to run out and pick one up while I started working on getting the CPU case open.

The problem is that the CPU is rackmounted. So first, I had to remove the two screws holding it in the rack. (It would have been four screws, but it is being held up by an old direct box of extremely dubious quality that is more useful as a shim than it is as a piece of audio gear.)

I had to pull it out of the rack, on top of the quilt that I put on top of the outboard gear next to the console, because the CPU would crush the gear otherwise and although most of the cables can be fairly easily disconnected, the power cable would have to be disconnected at the console end, so it is simpler to leave that cable attached. And that limits how far I can move the CPU.

I then had to remove eighteen screws to get the case open.

And then I could replace the battery.

And put all 20 screws back.

And wire everything back up.

I then booted into BIOS setup and filled in everything that had been lost.

And the system booted.

But wouldn't reboot, because it lost the BIOS settings again.

So I let it run for a while longer and now it remembers some of the BIOS settings.

I think if I let it run overnight, it will recover its little mind.

And that will be good. :)