So yeah, I had a plan...
Feb. 14th, 2009 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6But the universe decided not to go according to it. As usual. Damn you, universe. One day I will destroy you!!!
Anyway, as I may have mentioned before, the HD in my other computer is/was slowly dying. This is the computer I use to watch things on, and do anything on sites that require javascript (with a few exceptions, that I run on this one, like LJ). I got another one, a bigger one, for Xmas, but because I'm slow to change, and there were OS problems, I held off on actually changing it.
My plan was this: I would keep using my old HD and the crippled but workable system on my old HD until Saturday afternoon, after I watched BSG online. Then I would open up the case (a bit of a pain because the monitor usually rests on it and there's not a lot of room), install the new HD, install the new OS (have to move to XP because I was using 2000 on it and there seem to be no install disks left over from when I got it), then slave the old HD to it, copy over anything I wanted to keep and maybe continue to use the old one for a non-critical backup.
Then, last night, Friday, early in the evening, my computer crashed. It does this once in a while. Then it tried to boot and it couldn't. It does this once in a while too. In these situations, I get a special bootable CD and run chkdsk on it, and once that's done it usually boots up again. So I do so. It starts out okay, then aborts abruptly due to some unspecified error. I try again, it seems to hang for hours (and I mean that literally, I watched Terminator and Dollhouse on TV while letting it try) on the 'Correcting Volume Bitmap' stage. Finally I give up, and try a few other things, still can't get it to boot, before going to bed.
Okay, not too bad, a bit of a pain, but my plan can still work, I just have to install my new OS before watching BSG and such. This morning, I open up the case. Problem 1: The little ribbon thingies that connect the HDs to the board doesn't have room for more than one HD. So no master and slaving. Okay, I just switch to the new one. I can work out a way to get the data later, and even if I lose it I didn't really lose anything vital - knowing what was coming I'd backed up most of my critical stuff here.
Now, despite being with computers most of my life, I'm not huge on the hardware-side of things. So much of these problems may seem naive mistakes to y'all, so I'll cut them. Problem 2 then crops up. I can't seem to boot from any of the Windows XP install disks I have. After some looking around, I figure maybe I have to partition and format the HD first. So I load up a different bootable CD full of dos tools, and I do that. It takes several more hours. The same problem seems to persist. I load up the bootable CD again and look around and figure, okay, I partitioned them, but didn't format them. Fair enough. Do that. Try again. Still won't boot from the XP CD. It's a legal CD, and I can run it in my computer and it seems functional, just won't boot from it, even though it boots from other things.
So after about 5 hours of trying, I gave up and have temporarily gone back to trying to get my old HD to work again. Still no luck there, either. :P In short, I hate the universe and want it to die.
Oh, and in other news, LJ seems to be very sporadic with giving me comment notifications lately. Sometimes I lose all comments for days, and then they start up again (but I don't get the missing ones), and then disappear again. So if we've had ongoing conversations I just dropped, that might be why. Sorry.
So, yay. :P
Anyway, as I may have mentioned before, the HD in my other computer is/was slowly dying. This is the computer I use to watch things on, and do anything on sites that require javascript (with a few exceptions, that I run on this one, like LJ). I got another one, a bigger one, for Xmas, but because I'm slow to change, and there were OS problems, I held off on actually changing it.
My plan was this: I would keep using my old HD and the crippled but workable system on my old HD until Saturday afternoon, after I watched BSG online. Then I would open up the case (a bit of a pain because the monitor usually rests on it and there's not a lot of room), install the new HD, install the new OS (have to move to XP because I was using 2000 on it and there seem to be no install disks left over from when I got it), then slave the old HD to it, copy over anything I wanted to keep and maybe continue to use the old one for a non-critical backup.
Then, last night, Friday, early in the evening, my computer crashed. It does this once in a while. Then it tried to boot and it couldn't. It does this once in a while too. In these situations, I get a special bootable CD and run chkdsk on it, and once that's done it usually boots up again. So I do so. It starts out okay, then aborts abruptly due to some unspecified error. I try again, it seems to hang for hours (and I mean that literally, I watched Terminator and Dollhouse on TV while letting it try) on the 'Correcting Volume Bitmap' stage. Finally I give up, and try a few other things, still can't get it to boot, before going to bed.
Okay, not too bad, a bit of a pain, but my plan can still work, I just have to install my new OS before watching BSG and such. This morning, I open up the case. Problem 1: The little ribbon thingies that connect the HDs to the board doesn't have room for more than one HD. So no master and slaving. Okay, I just switch to the new one. I can work out a way to get the data later, and even if I lose it I didn't really lose anything vital - knowing what was coming I'd backed up most of my critical stuff here.
Now, despite being with computers most of my life, I'm not huge on the hardware-side of things. So much of these problems may seem naive mistakes to y'all, so I'll cut them. Problem 2 then crops up. I can't seem to boot from any of the Windows XP install disks I have. After some looking around, I figure maybe I have to partition and format the HD first. So I load up a different bootable CD full of dos tools, and I do that. It takes several more hours. The same problem seems to persist. I load up the bootable CD again and look around and figure, okay, I partitioned them, but didn't format them. Fair enough. Do that. Try again. Still won't boot from the XP CD. It's a legal CD, and I can run it in my computer and it seems functional, just won't boot from it, even though it boots from other things.
So after about 5 hours of trying, I gave up and have temporarily gone back to trying to get my old HD to work again. Still no luck there, either. :P In short, I hate the universe and want it to die.
Oh, and in other news, LJ seems to be very sporadic with giving me comment notifications lately. Sometimes I lose all comments for days, and then they start up again (but I don't get the missing ones), and then disappear again. So if we've had ongoing conversations I just dropped, that might be why. Sorry.
So, yay. :P
