Server
Special thanks to Wiatt for giving me an old (dead) box that still had some life in it. The box itself is gone. The motherboard worked for about five minutes and then something happened between it and the video card. It never came up again. The drive looks good. The power supply works. I was upset for a moment that it was only a 140 watt power supply, but then I found out the power supply in the old server was a 90 watt.
If only I had just pulled the power supply and tried it first. No, I had to put the hard drives in the new machine and boot it up. Mandrake 9.2 found the new hardware and booted up. All was well, until I shut the machine down and tried to make a few adjustments. That is when I figured out the motherboard was no longer communicating with one of the on-board components. That is when you hit the power button and it just beeps at you. So, I go through many screws and a couple of busted plastic plates (to get to a couple of the screws) to yank the power supply out of Wiatt's machine. I plug the power supply into the old computer, or more like plug everything in. It is not as easy as it sounds. Then power up. The boot goes through the same configuration as before, only I miss one important distinction. The video card is still set to the Wiatt machine. Well, that screws me. X server (the graphical user interface) will not run. I get a text prompt. I log in. I copy my important files over to a backup folder on the second drive. Then I get mad. I rant for a moment. Then something tells me to try VNC. It is already set up. The service is running. I hop on and sure enough, the X-windows screens pop up without trouble. The VNC system does not rely on a video driver. I hit Config-Drake and reset the the old crappy Riva board that is in the old box, then reboot. ta-da. I have my web server back.
This means pictures will now work again. My "home page" links will start working again. And, least important of all, the "bald guy" jpg file will start working again so all those nuts using the keywords on Google's image search will actually get to view the file again. I get ten hits a week off that jpg.