I spent a goodly portion of last night, this morning before getting to work late, and this evening cussing at computer hardware. This is not necessarily a unique phenomenon; I can often be heard to toss expletives towards various chunks of metal and plastic while down in my basement workroom, but this session’s outbursts were, I have to say, particularly spectacular.
I am a big believer, however, in having justification for your actions, and I believe that profanity is to be best used when applied in appropriate situations. So, let me briefly describe my situation:
I bought a new hard drive for our computer systems, as we’re starting to run out of space, what with Yolanda’s CD-burning job and so forth. So I got a very nice Seagate drive, 7200 rpm, 120GB. Nothing too fancy, but quite easily the largest disk in the household.
Now, Simon, my main workstation, has the big drives inside of it as that’s where a lot of the video/audio and other big things reside in the house. My rationale in this process stated that I should put the 120GB drive into Simon and replace 2 drives, a 60GB and a 40GB. That gives me another 20GB of space while freeing up 2 whole drives for use in other systems (probably Roo and someone else, I imagine.)
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So, last night I shut down Simon and hauled him to the basement and started the swap by copying all the files to the new drive. At the moment, that consists of 85GB of data that got consolidated onto that one drive — a pretty impressive amount in anybody’s book.
So, the copy went fine. As I start unmounting drives, I think about my Windows partition. Now, Simon never gets booted into Windows, mostly because it runs really crappy on this hardware and I have far too many important things happening in Linux to take the time rebooting. It was hard enough having Simon offline to make this switch, as you’ll see in a bit.
I decided that it’d be best to free up the Windows partition and use it for my Home partition, where my email and personal files would sit. So, I changed the partition type to Linux, formatted it to Reiser, and re-ran LILO to ensure that the boot record was set up correctly.
Rebooted the machine with only the new drives inside of it, and I get, “NO SYSTEM DISK” error. Hrm. No huge deal. So I reboot with a CD, log in, and re-LILO again. Reboot. Same error. Consternation. Reboot with CD, re-LILO again, and for extra good measure, re-save the partition table with the bootable flag set. Reboot — NO SYSTEM. ARGH! Now I’m starting to get annoyed.
So I go along with this, back and forth, back and forth, with no joy, no glory in the process at all. Meanwhile, the pressure from getting this machine back up and running for my wife’s job and my own projects was mounting. I had to give up last night around 1 or so.
Started again this morning, with a fresh start, right? No love there, either. Same thing, made me late for work. *sighs*
Again tonight. Over and over. Finally, I decided that I should wipe the drive and recopy all the files, so I copied ALL files off to the new drive, wiped the old, redid the partition table, and reformatted. Reboot, recopy all the files BACK, re-LILO, and reboot. NO SYSTEM.
Shit.
This was going nowhere fast. Next step? Start unplugging stuff. Yank cables, pull cards, etc.
FINALLY, I get it to boot. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, and I eventually went and found the combination — the new drive, this shiny Seagate, wanted, no, insisted on being on the Master side of the 2nd channel. Basically, I swapped positions with the CD-ROM drive, and everything works like a charm.
THIS is why movies like Office Space were made, folks. The beating fields for frustrating hardware are real, they exist, and they are frequented on regular occasion.
