Building hardware is always interesting and somewhat challenging as the rate of development of new products makes it hard to keep track of the best selection. After wondering between different specifications, I decided to acquire the following hardware:
- Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe, 192 EUR
- Chipset: Intel Z77 Express chipset
- Processor: Intel Core i5-3550 3.3GHz, 218 EUR
- Memory: DDR3-1600MHz Kingston 8 GB x2, 116 EUR
- Power: Corsair CX430, 50 EUR
- Case: Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced Mini-ITX, 45 EUR
From the past I have several hard disks to spare since I cannot seem to get rid of the old one when I need to change it from somewhere. Most of them are used as external drives and contain something important. It took a while to clear them and now this barebone has three hard disks.
The metadata left on the 3.5” disks from them being used for RAID-1 in 2008, was still there and the Linux Kernel has too much respect for this metadata thus it will assume the RAID is still in use.
sudo dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/ddf_Kukko
Since it did not work and since the BIOS did not have any tools for hard disk managements, the following command needed to be run for both of the disks that were in the RAID earlier. It took some 5 hours per disk…
sudo time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
The trouble with those two 3.5” discs was that they were used about five years ago for RAID setup and that information was still in their metadata. Since Linux kernel works in a way that it tries to use that metadata even if the discs have not been set up for that purpose any more. It took a while to clear that information…
Anyhow now the system is running with Ubuntu Linux 12.10 x64 and I am still waiting to get the Blu-ray optical drive which was ordered at the same time with the other hardware, but the company (verkkokauppa.com) seems to have some difficulties obtaining it:
Since I am a big fan of Qt, I want to try out Razor-qt as a desktop manager…