Life: I HATE TECHNOLOGY
Mood: I feel like cutting myself. Playing: Alice in Chains – Over Now
ROAR I HATE COMPUTERS AND THEY HATE ME BACK. Well, that’s not true. I love my jbox. It works so perfectly, is so useful, just plain pretty, and I love it. Oh, and speaking of jBox, ROAR! =(
So last night I set on a quest to install a 40gb hard drive into my big rig computer. Well, because of the way the HDD bays are set up (facing the window) and my rediculously long, round, and stuff IDE cables (loo, why does that sound so bad?), I can’t fit it into the normal bays without the side panel not being able to close. So after being pissed off, I thought about putting it in one of the two floppy bays. That would work pretty good, seeing as how I don’t have a floppy drive at all. Oh, wait! The bay is jammed in there for some reason, and it is pretty much impossible to get out! Yay! Lucky me! ROAR.
So I decided to try this little removable hard drive box. Each tray has an IDE and power connector inside of it, the bay-unit screws in, hooks up it’s own IDE and power, and then each tray slides in and connects through a SCSI-ish connector. I only have one drive, and it fits and mountes perfectly into a 5″ bay, so what the haell? Get it all ready…and I find out that the lock on the bay unit needs to be locked for the drive to power up and work. It’s one of those circular standard key lock things. I looked around for a key buuutttt I couldn’t find one… And then I looked at the lock, and figured out how to pick it with a couple of paper-clips.
OK. Done. Now what? Hmm…the cable header won’t fit onto the bay unit. No pins are bent…whuuteva, it gets on eventually with a little force. Turn it on, boot it up, and Windows hangs for a good minute before loading up the graphical loading screen. Maybe it was pre-installing the new hard drive? No…it doesn’t work that way…oh wait, it’s WINDOWS, it doesn’t have to do everything the right way!
I find my Gentoo CD, pop it in, and begin to set up my new Linux system. Things go great, the kernel compiled rather smoothly, with the exception that there are no drivers for my network and sound right in the kernel source. No biggie, found them on the intarweb, got them transfered in by means of thumbdrive. Set the computer to compile X11, xfce, gaim, and gdm over night, and then it’s time for bed (at about 5am).
So I ended up getting out of bed at 1pm, and make the ultimatly tough decision to just not go in to work. u rah rah. Rebooted my computer in to Windows to check some things out, and it hangs before the graphical loading screen again…only this time it doesn’t move at all. Rebooted again, tried safe-mode, no dice.
At first I thought it was some weird shit with Windows not liking that a hard drive is the slave to an optical drive, but later on I realize that the stupid bay unit has the full 40pins pin header, meaning it’s an older variation of ATA, and my cable fits 39 pins…to get it plugged in, it actually poked a hole on the plug. I was telling buddy Patrick about this, and he said that the hanging could be due to some interferance, and it sorta made sense. I took some nail clippers and took the pin off, but that didn’t help anything.
I think it’s just something with it being the older ATA, because I remembered that Linux also stalled on boot, and gave some weird assorted errors when initalizing the IDE chanel. =(
Oh wellz. I called my brother, who was supposed to be stopping by sometime today and checked if he had any brackets for mounting HDDs in the 5″ bays, and he did! He didn’t make it down here though =/ His wife and kids are going to stop by on Thursday, though, and I guess it’s not too bad having to wait until then since a good chunk of the system is compiled already.
And I am back in Windows now. I had to boot up an XP install disk and use the recovery console to rebuild the boot loader, though. LILO worked great when both drives were hooked up, but without the 40gb it stalled and spit out a bunch of random numbers. THAT DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE. The boot loader is on the primary drive, and that’s it. If one of the systems is missing, it will just tell you that when it tries to boot it =/
I have been listening to Alice in Chains virtually all day, and that is a great thing. If I hadn’t been, I probably would have killed quite a few people in frustration.
Yay Alice in Chains!
I finished them right around the time of the mid-way break of the class. Once it started back up, I started up PocketWord and started to rant and vent about the stupid class I had to sit in, and here it is.
