This Frankenputer has since been retired; my current machines are a custom Linux box and a cheap Dell jukebox.
Birth of Frankenputer
Frankenputering refers to the use of innovative solutions, extreme methods, and just plain cheap hacks in order to get one's computer functioning. The term was coined by my friend and roommate Brian during sophomore year. After outgrowing his mid-tower case with the addition of a monster full-height SCSI hard drive that revved like a frieght train, he had no room for his CD-ROM. It was only a matter of time before he needed it again, at which point it got mounted in a spare, empty case. It was quite a site: two cases, with no covers, a bundle of cables running inbetween the two, and a random chunk of aluminum damping drive vibrations. Brian has since graduated to a full tower case, but as you can see on the right, it's not running much smoother.
Bride and Bastard Child of Frankenputer
This winter saw a flurry of putering. After a semester of banging on Unix boxes and Macs at Sandia, I was primed for some PC hardware upgrades. While I prepared to install a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM, Brian discovered his system had gone kaput, so we set about a three-day marathon session of frankenputering.
First was the task of getting my new board into my old Dell case. All was fine and well until I found that Dell used a special power connector, so I was out of luck and in the market for a new case. Only it was Sunday, so there were none to be had. So it was on to Brian's computer, which seemed to have a bad boot partition. Reassembling my old parts plus Brian's drive and a read-only FAT32 driver (gotta love those MS filesystems!), we were able to boot NT and salvage his code.
The next day found us at the computer store, in search of new cases (Brian also needed a new one), and some random other parts so I could build a second machine out of my old parts. I asked the guy for a SCSI CD-ROM drive, and he just kinda looked at me funny and told me what a rare request it was. You see, since getting a mad phat Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card last year, I've been on a quest to "purify" my system and only my floppy and CD drives are still in disention. Given the response to my request for a SCSI CD, I wasn't even going to ask for a SCSI floppy...
We returned back to the laboratory, which at this point consisted of four cases, two monitors, three keyboards, two mice, and a heap of boards and cables. Brian's system was happy once it had a new case and hard drive, so he went about installing Windows 98 while I got my motherboard and drives moved into my new case. The moment of truth came: I flicked the switch, and nothing happened. The next several hours consisted of swapping parts in and out of the two puters to figure out what wasn't working. Tech support was full of innovative ideas, including running the board outside of the case on a static bag to eliminate any grounding problems (they really suggested this- twice). It came down to a bad motherboard, which meant restoring Brian's files wasn't going be as simple as just copying them over the network.
Plan B was to boot from my drive and copy things over. After a few blue screens of death, Brian recalled that hard drive formatting was SCSI-card specific, and so we'd have to swap cards to get my drive to boot. Accomplished that only to get conflicting SCSI ID's and then to be reminded that the FAT32 driver was read-only. My backup tapes were full with my own precious data, so we turned to my Zip drive and Iomega's dirty-bastard guy backup program. A few Zip disks, cable swaps, and software installs later, the data was back in place and everything was just peachy.
Well, except for the fact I still didn't have a working system. My new board showed up just in time for Christmas, and - proof that it is a season of miracles - actually worked. This left me free to deal with a messed up NT installation, a bad repair disk, and a dud sound card. Inbetween trips to UPS and bursts of colorful language, I got working what I could: my new scanner, a proxy server to share the lone modem and dial-up connection, and an OpenBSD install on my old machine.
Update
My machines stay pretty much in a constant state of flux, usually sitting around without cases in the middle of a pile of expansion cards. Some highlights: running dual monitors under NT4 (nevermind that it's not supported in the OS), running an OpenBSD firewall and web server, and running Redhat Linux, FreeBSD, NT4, Win95, and Win98 all within a week on my main workstation.
My obsession with running dual monitors has carried over under Linux, where it involves pre-release snapsnots of XFree86 and all the bugginess that they entail. But it does work! The other phenomonal pile of spooge that actually works is my Windows solution: running 98 under VM Ware, and connecting to my old Windows drives using a Samba mount over the psuedo-network connection.