The wife and I recently built us some new machines... Ok, technically not completely new, we used some of our older parts like the harddrives and her floppy...I am still using my old RAM...which means I have to lower my bus speed to compensate...which means my proc is running just a little better than my old one... Anyways, I guess the point is, old stuff dies. And well, it should, it is old. We did not however, anticipate that her harddrive would die within two weeks of replacing every thing. One night I was shutting everything down on my system, and what did I hear but a click click click coming from hers. Lucky I was awake to shut it down as that could have been really annoying to have to lost everything. As it turns out, it had plenty of life in for me to back up the files on another machine so we saved everything. After every thing was backed up I tossed in some old floppys I have with HD utils...nothing. The drive just locks up now. Oh well, at least I got to use a floppy, it has been ages since I had done that.
So, why the history talk, right? This happened last week and should have been mentioned last week, right? Well, the point of the story is what we got to replace, 2 shiney new SATA Western Digital 160Gb drives. I figured that since we were shooting to keep the systems as close as possible, why not get one for each system... supposedly they are faster, they have volumes of space, yada yada. Oh, and I got a nifty sound module with them as well, more later if I don't forget about it.
Ok, so apparently the drivers for the VIA RAID chipset (the thing that make the computer realize SATA drives are hooked up) is not part of ANY Windows installation CD. They have this little area where you hit F6 in the install and load them up from a floppy. Now I am thinking that I have to dig up a floppy drive for my computer. Since I don't use them I did not install one...at least Erin's has one. I can just wait to install mine.
Oh wait, there is not a working OS on her machine that will let me copy files. Hey, I know what DOS is, I will just toss in an old win98 boot disk and copy files the old fashioned way. Ok, that idea sucked. I did not start using a computer until DOS was something you would pull up in a window on in Windows 95 to play games your friends parents played when they were a kid. Not a problem, this will give me a fairly lame reason to use my Knoppix CD (bootable CD based version of linux). Fire it up...pretty...mount the drives, copy away, reboot, and start the install again. Nothing. (I later find out that Knoppix, by default, handles everything in read only. Which is reasonable since, well, it is entirely on a CD and you can't write to it.) So I start digging around looking for an old floppy drive to install in my machine...and old is what I got, damn old. It was starting to rust in places old. So, tossing the files over, everything looks good, toss it in the wife's machine....still nothing.
I am not one to try an make this site kid friendly. I don't care about what people think of my language or usage of words. Hell, I don't even care if people like my opinion about things. But I care enough not to post the filth that spewed from my mouth over the course of the next SEVERAL HOURS where I make ZERO PROGRESS.
Ok, I am bored with all the details. From 2:40 to around 11pm when I gave up, I spent the majority of that time trying to "persuade" the wife's machine to do anything. We did hit campus, Circuit City, Petco, and, no that is it, in there, but other than that I was working on the computer. The next day I realized that the floppy drive in Erin's machine died some time while I was playing with it and that was why I was having fits. I tossed the harddrive in my machine, loaded up Windows XP Home with minimal effort, tossed it back in her machine to activate and load programs...cake.
Now back to my machine. I tossed the new harddrive in, booted up, no hard disk recognized. About 20 minutes of reseating, blowing, booting, beggeing, bending, and well, more cursing it recognized the drive. Yay. I tossed the XP pro disk in, read all the files, first boot up in the install...cyclic redundancy. I have no idea what "cyclic redundancy" is, but it said my media was bad. I made a couple more attempts, nothing. Luckly I have a friend who likewise has XP pro, so I borrowed his disk so I could finish the install. When I went back in, it asked if I wanted to install fresh, or repair what was there. So, for some stupid reason, I chose repair. Everything was happy until I was at the login screen and it is asking for a password...It never asked me for a password during the install...what do I do now. Short of breaking in forcibly, stealing the password file and taking a couple of days to crack it open...I could reinstall, and install fresh this time. There we go, perfect.
I got the OS installed. Most of my drivers and apps are in place. I need to go grab the file off of the other hard drive and pull them over. Yeah, so since I had to move the SATA cable to plug the IDE cable for my old hard drive, it hates me again. After five minutes of messing with it and getting no results I decide I would toss my files over on network storage, remove the old drive, and then play with this stupid cable...otherwise I would be doing this twice. I even went so far as to make sure ALL of my cables were where I would later want them so that I could not mess up the picky SATA cable. So now it is all there, all happy, and I just have to finish installing shit.
Now the sound module... just to make this post longer. If you have those nifty cathod tube lights in your system (CCTs), you can hook them to this sound module and let it control them. The sound module has four settings: off, on, and blink are all self explanitory. But it also has a "sound control" setting. What this does is listen for ambient noise, and flicker the lights accordingly... like to music. The sound control itself is not as sensitive as I would like. I basically have to blast the music in order for it to pick it up well enough. I am hoping to find one that has a minijack input so I can hook it up directly to my sound card. As for now, the sensor is set up in my case and is catching the air from one of my fans...it looks like lightning inside my case.
