I used to despise mounting rails.
I’m beginning to reconsider that opinion after spending twenty minutes last night beating the hell out of a railless case last night so my two drive SCA hotswap internal bay would fit into the two 5.25″ bays it wanted. Still doesn’t quite fit right. Its noticeably crooked. That’s probably more a result of it being from a Dell case. They’re never quite the standard size. I did nearly rip a few caps off my mainboard during the ordeal. The hotswap bay is a bit too long for my case, too.
In any event, if I had stuck it in a system with rails, I suspect it would’ve slid right in and that would’ve been it. (It didn’t help that my K7S5A refused to boot with the MegaRAID card until I flashed to the latest BIOS release.) Now I’m compiling a kernel with support for the card. Then I need to copy all my filesystems over, except /home.
Meanwhile I need to patch the file server’s kernel so it’ll support the DP83820 card correctly. I’m still running the 2.4 series on that box, so I’ll need to get a working 2.6 configuration first. Soon it’ll be time to create an initrd and move the root to the Quantum Atlas.