A series of unfortunate events.
Sep. 27th, 2006 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shirenomadLast week my office headphones decided to lose all treble. Given I am allowed to listen to music at work if I use headphones (and usually do whenever I'm at my desk and not engaged in conversation), this proved annoyingly limiting. So I moved my home headphones to the office. Much better, except now I need headphones at home. A lower priority -- the walls aren't that thin at the house -- but still handy when I'm up late just to be courteous.
Also, I was thinking about getting a new mouse anyway; I've recently started volunteering at the church handling their projector, and the attached laptop needs a working USB mouse (I loathe those touch pads), so I thought I'd bring over my old one and get something nice and ergonomic for my home use.
First mistake: I decide to purchase both at Fry's. Yes, Fry's. It is physically impossible to leave Fry's without buying at least one more item than you planned, because it's discounted so temptingly and you would have bought it at some point anyway and... ahem. Anyway, I was aware of this and had pretty much budgeted an extra $20 for damage control on that subject...
And they had a huge stack of hard drives for sale. Brand new 400 GB hard drives... for $110. I dearly wanted more hard drive space. My three (count them!) hard drives came out to barely 100 GB total. And two of those three were under-20G bricks that predated the current administration, so their stability was suspect to boot. Sale ended the next day. CRAP.
No problem, I didn't need that kidney anyway. Second mistake, however, was thinking it would be a simple plug-and-go operation. I hadn't installed a new hard drive since I reformatted the entire mess and started over two and a half years ago, so I'd forgotten the trouble I had getting it to recognize three drives at once. The fact that I had to remove all drives (including the CD and DVD drives) and the graphics card before I got enough clearance to extract the oldest (and largest) of the bricks only added to the confusion, especially since I wound up wasting nearly an hour figuring out where the serial ATA cable disappeared to afterward.
Then I had to convince the machine that yes, the boot drive was the one attached to the serial ATA, not the ultra ATA. (Look, the Ultra doesn't have any data on it! No, I'm not going to reinstall everything on the new one! I've got everything the way I like it on the old one!) Then it didn't like the jumper settings on the new one and would recognize it during initialization but not in Windows. (What were the previous jumper settings when this all worked? Did this drive even have a jumper when I started?)
At 1 in the AM, it finally recognized the main drive, the new drive, and the brick I had plugged in for data transfer, all at the same time. I declared it "good enough" and called it a night. This evening I'll be handling the re-partitioning, data transfer, and with luck I'll even be able to swap bricks at some point and get its old data direct (though the other brick is archival stuff and is completely backed up to DVD if it comes to that). Bonus is that most of this can be done by punching a few keys and standing back for a half an hour, so I think I'll get in some Katamari or a DVD while I wait... I need the stress relief. But frankly, given how things went yesterday, I'll feel good simply if the settings still work today.
At least the new mouse is comfy.
Also, I was thinking about getting a new mouse anyway; I've recently started volunteering at the church handling their projector, and the attached laptop needs a working USB mouse (I loathe those touch pads), so I thought I'd bring over my old one and get something nice and ergonomic for my home use.
First mistake: I decide to purchase both at Fry's. Yes, Fry's. It is physically impossible to leave Fry's without buying at least one more item than you planned, because it's discounted so temptingly and you would have bought it at some point anyway and... ahem. Anyway, I was aware of this and had pretty much budgeted an extra $20 for damage control on that subject...
And they had a huge stack of hard drives for sale. Brand new 400 GB hard drives... for $110. I dearly wanted more hard drive space. My three (count them!) hard drives came out to barely 100 GB total. And two of those three were under-20G bricks that predated the current administration, so their stability was suspect to boot. Sale ended the next day. CRAP.
No problem, I didn't need that kidney anyway. Second mistake, however, was thinking it would be a simple plug-and-go operation. I hadn't installed a new hard drive since I reformatted the entire mess and started over two and a half years ago, so I'd forgotten the trouble I had getting it to recognize three drives at once. The fact that I had to remove all drives (including the CD and DVD drives) and the graphics card before I got enough clearance to extract the oldest (and largest) of the bricks only added to the confusion, especially since I wound up wasting nearly an hour figuring out where the serial ATA cable disappeared to afterward.
Then I had to convince the machine that yes, the boot drive was the one attached to the serial ATA, not the ultra ATA. (Look, the Ultra doesn't have any data on it! No, I'm not going to reinstall everything on the new one! I've got everything the way I like it on the old one!) Then it didn't like the jumper settings on the new one and would recognize it during initialization but not in Windows. (What were the previous jumper settings when this all worked? Did this drive even have a jumper when I started?)
At 1 in the AM, it finally recognized the main drive, the new drive, and the brick I had plugged in for data transfer, all at the same time. I declared it "good enough" and called it a night. This evening I'll be handling the re-partitioning, data transfer, and with luck I'll even be able to swap bricks at some point and get its old data direct (though the other brick is archival stuff and is completely backed up to DVD if it comes to that). Bonus is that most of this can be done by punching a few keys and standing back for a half an hour, so I think I'll get in some Katamari or a DVD while I wait... I need the stress relief. But frankly, given how things went yesterday, I'll feel good simply if the settings still work today.
At least the new mouse is comfy.
