Sunday, April 10

Have I stated lately how badly I hate computers?  

Friday night, while chatting with El Coste, my computer spontaneously rebooted. I wasn't happy about that, but I really wasn't happy that my boot hard drive (which I already knew was not exactly healthy according to S.M.A.R.T. according to HDDLife, but I thought it was fine. But I've had two incidences (interestingly enough, now that I think about, after similar reboots…) where the health kept taking a hit. But now it was zero (how that was "defined", I have no idea), and the motherboard was even complaining about it at boot-up. It finally decided to boot, so I decided that I needed a new hard drive, pronto. Not really the best time for me to be spending the bucks, but I wasn't going for an upgrade.

I did a quick froogle, and saw that the cheapest 80gigger was going to $45 plus shipping. I checked out Best Buy, despite their idiocy on what is a good currency, and the smallest Maxtor was 160 gigs. The only 80gigger they had was a Western Digital for $90, which was ridiculous. The_Rose and I continued to window shop at various other places, and we ended up at Office Depot, where I found an 80 gigger for $45, no rebate, sale ending that day. Cool.

I get it plugged into my system, install Partion Magic and find out that I can't reliable write to floppies with this system. It reads them fine, but writing is just hit/miss. My existing floppies are just aging too badly, so I opened up a new package of floppies, and worked with it on my other computer, which helped, but still had some weirdness.

I ended up running PM through Windows, and letting it do it's thing. Well, I screwed up what I wanted things to be (the new Drive C was ending up on a logical partition, not a primary partition, and that wouldn't have worked), so I stopped that in the middle, which had the MBR screwed up. Well, PM wouldn't touch it, so I thought I'd see what Windows would do, and Windows thought it would become a dynamic disk, so I thought that would fix things. No, PM then refused to touch it then (stupid PM!), so I ended up using MS-DOS 6.22 FDISK to reset that. Blowing away the wrong drive! I finally got a boot disk with Partedit on it, that worked, and I was able to recover the blown drive, check it, then blew away the correct drive, and set PM up to do it's magic (correctly this time!), and got the disk the way I wanted it. In hindsight, I guess I should have let PM finish it's work, then let it reconvert that partition back to primary. I find it extremely odd that PM will copy a partion as a primary partion, and then proceed to change it to a logical volume. Strange. And extremely time consuming.

So, I get the old hard drive pulled out, put the new hard drive in it's place, and find out that the damn system won't power up! The power supply seems to have gone flakey on me, but I'm not sure. I've tested it, and it would work sometimes, and otherwise not. Fiddling with the power cables, I finally get the system to power. But now, neither the motherboard controller, nor the Matrox 133 IDE adapter for the second hard drive are showing up in the POST. I played with the ribbon connectors to make sure they were good and tight, and although I never did dicern any movement of the connectors, the next time I booted, they showed. And the system booted just fine! It detected new hardware, now what that new hardware was, I have no idea, unless it felt the need to take the new hard drive and call it new hardware. Yeah, that must be it, since it does go my model number. Even though it's the same drive that was on the secondary IDE controller. Weird.

The old drive is a year out of warranty, so I guess I can't get a replacement for that.

I'm just glad I don't have to do a total reinstall from scratch. Although if I did, it probably would be with W2K3 Server, and set it up as a workstation.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 4/10/2005 10:47:00 AM    0 comments Links to this post

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