So I thought Buttercup only had the car Wesley and the boat Mahdee as main competition for things that “we-must-pay-attention-to-and-fix.”  Wrong, bring Mote, the Shuttle computer we purchased in February, into the picture.  Yesterday, the solid state drive (of course the one that we use for the main OS, VMWare, all the installed programs, and anything else of importance) decided it had seen enough action and wasn’t going to take our abuse any longer.  So, that brought both David’s and my work to a halt.  We both use the computer at the same time.  Here’s a link to the discussions about our shared computer on our other blog.  I suppose the important background discussion is this one.  We do have the computer on 24/7 and it is hard at work running programs even when we’re not–so it is not surprising that maybe something gave way.

Last night David worked into the wee hours to get the computer back up and running using the data hard drive while I investigated BIOS updates that might be needed and whether that was the problem.  Today, we went over to our favorite computer store to pick up a USB-to-SATA Hard Drive Adapter so we can test the 2.5″ 128 GB Crucial solid state drive on another computer (the laptop) or via another path on Mote.  I’m hopeful that it is simply the (still under warranty) hard drive or the 2.5″ to 3.5″ adaptor we use–I’d hate to think it’s the SATA hard drive controller.  Though the motherboard and computer are also still under warranty, it would be a big hassle to deal with replacing Mote.

Today, for David, is surprisingly consumed with getting the mirror of the solid state drive (with all our databases and programs) up and running on the larger 2TB “data” drive in the computer.  So–no pictures of Buttercup fuel lines yet.  I suspect that will be delayed until the weekend.