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Jun. 26th, 2003 09:27 pmAs good a day as yesterday was on an interpersonal level, it was bad on a computing level.
Faced with a dearth of available storage space, i broke one of my personal cardinal rules- don't f*ck with a stable, running system. There's a reason i have that rule- every time i break it, something bites me in the backside.
It really was overdue, however, and since it was a fairly straightforward operation, i figured i'd take the plunge and move around hard drives- freeing up the old 10 GB drive the OS is on for duty in the other computer, moving it's contents and those of the four 5 GB partitions on the 20 GB drive to roomier partitions on the new 80 GB drive (bought on eBay for about $0.60/GB), and freeing up the 20 GB as a dedicated drive for a SuSE 8.2 Linux install (i like to physically keep different OS segregated from each other, and it's easy to make the Linux partition so the Windows one will completely ignore it).
So the plan was to set up the new drive with a 20 GB primary partition and four around 15 GB each- twice what Windows was currently infesting, three times what each of the data and application drives had (all the partitions have stuff installed on them, and it'd be easier to keep everything in it's place than to do all the registry and shortcut hacking to get them pointed to new homes).
Partitioning the drive was easy. Firing things up to copy the OS partition to the new primary one seemed pretty straightforward too. Just took a bit longer than expected.
Or did it?
After finishing the process, i pulled out the old drive, put in the new one, and fired it back up- only to have it refuse to recognize a bootable drive. Figured something was just a little odd and went hunting for the installation media. Couldn't find it. Grrr.
At this point, it was time to go meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greenshadows for lunch at the Ballard locks. damashita brought her new nature journal and drew a bit, alexander was his typically five-year-old self, and nicholas was mainly asleep. It didn't seem as if we were there too long, but it became 5 p.m. in the blink of an eye.
Came back, tracked down the CD, and set off to repair the Windows installation. Unfortunately, the old CD-ROM drive which is the primary optical media reader (i try to use the CD-RW drive as little as possible except for actually burning discs) figured it'd be a good time to sound both asthmatic and give voice to its death knells. Listening to a CD drive grind is not a pleasant sound, and the concomitant windows setup errors (because it really wasn't reading things well during its spin-up, grind, whirr, chatter, spin-down cycles) were pretty disconcerting as well.
So, thinking that it'd be good to get back up and running, i put the 10 GB back in, figuring that something had mucked with the partition table or something. Reinstalled the old drive, booted the system... and still the same error. After a few different tries, and a few unprintable words in a random smattering of languages, i figured out the cause of the problem. Yours truly, being the occasional dumb-ass, had set the BIOS boot order to look at HDD1, not HDD0, and not thinking twice about it fired it back up. [I don't know why drives are numbered starting with 0, but they are, and i should have thought to verify that i had the boot order right about two hours before i did.] Correcting that just took a few seconds, so i put the new drive back in and fired it up.
All well and good, right?
No such luck. For whatever reason, it confused itself a bit, and tried to boot into Windows98, very unsuccessfully, since all the Win9x memory management stuff was gutted from the machine shortly after the XP upgrade. It also had a tough time trying to handle the registry. No surprise.
So i figured i'd try to grind through setup and repair the installation. Three tries with the old CD drive failed after about an hour apiece- twice actually making it into the setup UI, but rebooting for no apparent reason during hardware detection. Finally i gave up on the old drive and unplugged the ribbon cable from it.
Fortunately, the generic ATAPI driver works on burners as well. Working from a healthy drive, the installation went pretty quickly- no spontaneous reboots, but the earlier failures had garbled things to the point where it wouldn't allow me to attempt to repair the existing installation. I've always had good luck, though, convincing Windows to install on top of itself, so i installed into the same directory, and ended up, forty or so minutes later, back at the same desktop which i'd had before- with everything working properly.
Once recovered from this trauma, i'm going to move things from the other drive onto the partitions on the new one, and then do the Linux install on it. It may take a few days, though, before i'm ready to do it.
Faced with a dearth of available storage space, i broke one of my personal cardinal rules- don't f*ck with a stable, running system. There's a reason i have that rule- every time i break it, something bites me in the backside.
It really was overdue, however, and since it was a fairly straightforward operation, i figured i'd take the plunge and move around hard drives- freeing up the old 10 GB drive the OS is on for duty in the other computer, moving it's contents and those of the four 5 GB partitions on the 20 GB drive to roomier partitions on the new 80 GB drive (bought on eBay for about $0.60/GB), and freeing up the 20 GB as a dedicated drive for a SuSE 8.2 Linux install (i like to physically keep different OS segregated from each other, and it's easy to make the Linux partition so the Windows one will completely ignore it).
So the plan was to set up the new drive with a 20 GB primary partition and four around 15 GB each- twice what Windows was currently infesting, three times what each of the data and application drives had (all the partitions have stuff installed on them, and it'd be easier to keep everything in it's place than to do all the registry and shortcut hacking to get them pointed to new homes).
Partitioning the drive was easy. Firing things up to copy the OS partition to the new primary one seemed pretty straightforward too. Just took a bit longer than expected.
Or did it?
After finishing the process, i pulled out the old drive, put in the new one, and fired it back up- only to have it refuse to recognize a bootable drive. Figured something was just a little odd and went hunting for the installation media. Couldn't find it. Grrr.
At this point, it was time to go meet
greenshadows for lunch at the Ballard locks. damashita brought her new nature journal and drew a bit, alexander was his typically five-year-old self, and nicholas was mainly asleep. It didn't seem as if we were there too long, but it became 5 p.m. in the blink of an eye.Came back, tracked down the CD, and set off to repair the Windows installation. Unfortunately, the old CD-ROM drive which is the primary optical media reader (i try to use the CD-RW drive as little as possible except for actually burning discs) figured it'd be a good time to sound both asthmatic and give voice to its death knells. Listening to a CD drive grind is not a pleasant sound, and the concomitant windows setup errors (because it really wasn't reading things well during its spin-up, grind, whirr, chatter, spin-down cycles) were pretty disconcerting as well.
So, thinking that it'd be good to get back up and running, i put the 10 GB back in, figuring that something had mucked with the partition table or something. Reinstalled the old drive, booted the system... and still the same error. After a few different tries, and a few unprintable words in a random smattering of languages, i figured out the cause of the problem. Yours truly, being the occasional dumb-ass, had set the BIOS boot order to look at HDD1, not HDD0, and not thinking twice about it fired it back up. [I don't know why drives are numbered starting with 0, but they are, and i should have thought to verify that i had the boot order right about two hours before i did.] Correcting that just took a few seconds, so i put the new drive back in and fired it up.
All well and good, right?
No such luck. For whatever reason, it confused itself a bit, and tried to boot into Windows98, very unsuccessfully, since all the Win9x memory management stuff was gutted from the machine shortly after the XP upgrade. It also had a tough time trying to handle the registry. No surprise.
So i figured i'd try to grind through setup and repair the installation. Three tries with the old CD drive failed after about an hour apiece- twice actually making it into the setup UI, but rebooting for no apparent reason during hardware detection. Finally i gave up on the old drive and unplugged the ribbon cable from it.
Fortunately, the generic ATAPI driver works on burners as well. Working from a healthy drive, the installation went pretty quickly- no spontaneous reboots, but the earlier failures had garbled things to the point where it wouldn't allow me to attempt to repair the existing installation. I've always had good luck, though, convincing Windows to install on top of itself, so i installed into the same directory, and ended up, forty or so minutes later, back at the same desktop which i'd had before- with everything working properly.
Once recovered from this trauma, i'm going to move things from the other drive onto the partitions on the new one, and then do the Linux install on it. It may take a few days, though, before i'm ready to do it.
