Sunday, January 12, 2003 - Sun, 12 Jan 2003

One wall that I knew I was approaching was my hard drive space. I have 9 GB of my 10 GB hard drive now used. I’ve been looking for sometime for a new hard drive and have been delaying my purchase to get the best bang for the buck. Over the Boxing Day week, I finally bought a Western Digital 60 GB drive for $100 Cdn (= $65 US) from FutureShop on the web. They were backordered, and it arrived (free shipping) on Thursday. Today is the day to install it.

Now I’ve always been good with software, but never with hardware. I never look forward to installing hardware and expect my share of problems. Let’s get started …

First, back up everything important - especially including my Behold work. I don’t really expect to lose the contents of the old disk, in fact I want to set up the old disk as a slave drive, and it will act as my first level of backup in case my main drive gets wrecked. But just to be sure, I e-mail it offsite to myself and keep a copy of my work elsewhere.

Now, open up the case and lets get started. First read the instructions. Hook up the new drive as a slave. Whoops. I only have two power connectors to my old hard drive and my CD-ROM. Have to disconnect my CD-ROM for now and hook it up to my new hard drive. Start up the machine, and go into the BIOS setup program and set up the new drive as slave. Insert the Western Digital tools diskette and restart. From the tools program, select Install Drive. The install says my BIOS is not compatible with the new drive and it says it is adding its EZ_BIOS program to startup - which sounds fishy to me. My BIOS should be okay. The installation continues and I get it to copy all the files to the new drive so that I can make it my master and the old one the slave. The copying is in progress and will take almost 2 hours to copy 9 GB. During this time I run out to FutureShop and pick up a Y cable to turn one power connector into two ($10).

Take out the diskette and reboot and I can see both the C and D drives and all the data there looks okay. Now to flip the master and slaves. Reset the BIOS, Reboot and … “Sector not found reading drive C. Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?” I say Abort and the machine starts up okay. That’s a problem. But it can’t detect the new slave. I have a jumper to reset. But I never received the manual for my old hard drive. I can get on the web and do a search of the Fujitsu site and find the info for my drive. Reset the jumpers, and reboot. Still the Sector error, but it starts.

Let’s fix the Sector error. Try a Scandisk of the new drive. I get “The c:windows folder contained incorrect information about USER.DAT. The size of this file was different from the size recorded for it its folder. Error was corrected.” and a couple of other corrections. Reboot and the system starts up and then freezes. Hmmm. It must have wrecked my registry file USER.DAT. Reboot to DOS. Fortunately I have a recent copy of SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT on my old drive. Unprotect my current SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT and rename them. Unprotect the ones on my old drive, copy them over and protect them. Reboot. That is okay now. But still get the “Sector not found reading drive C.”

Run Scandisk again. It says: “Scandisk cannot read from the last cluster on drive C. This cluster is either damaged or your system is not configured properly. Drive C may need to have Logical Block Addressing (LBA) enabled to work properly, or its disk partition may be incorrectly marked as a non-LBA partition. Data loss can occur if your LBA setting or disk partition type for this drive is misconfigured.” Well, that tells me what this LBA is! I cancel out of Scandisk and reboot and check my BIOS and it is not set on the new drive for LBA. I reset it to LBA. Reboot and finally it seems to be going okay.

Six hours. (A few problems in between were left out of the above for brevity’s sake.) That’s enough for today.