So I have this old serverish box that hadn't been on for years. I think I built it in the mid 2000's and it had a 4 drive raid5 array with 250 gig ide drives. Last week I decided to get it over onto one of my newer drives with snapraid for parity.
The C drive was failing and one of the raid drives had dropped out entirely, and there were errors here and there on some of the other drives. Took several days to copy it all off. Afterward I decided to put a newer OS on it to fool around with it. It is an AGP system and I had an all-in-wonder I wanted to mess around with.
The BIOS is way before the EFI days, so I spent a lot of time trying to get a USB stick to boot, but never had any luck. I finally tried a dvd boot as I found an old barely working dvd writer. Most of my ancient discs wouldn't boot, and some of the ones that would were 64 bit stuff like newer windows. I finally got a debian 6 disc to boot.
I updated from 6 all the way up to the latest 12 (bookworm). I wish I had chronicled this journey as it was fraught with peril and assgoblinry. It was almost like installing windows 3.1 and upgrading all the way to 11.
Some of the releases, like I think 7 to 8, just worked and I was shocked at how easy it was. Some had some incredibly gnarly circular dependency problems. At some point in there, there was a breaking change in libc, which damn near everything uses, and I had to do alot of nasty apt tricks, removing almost everything to get it to install. This also killed ssh access so I had to plug a keyboard in.
Somewhere in there the old DVD drive gave up the ghost entirely so there was no way out but forward.
Another funny thing happened. The first few hours while I was copying stuff off the raid I noticed the machine was really unstable. I thought it was just the drive errors but eventually figured out that one side of the cpu heatsink had a broken clamp. I put the machine on its side and looked for something heavy to hold it down.
Perfect fit!