Adventures with SATA
Should Windows be renamed to Windoesn't? Let us begin.
Last weekend I went over to Vancouver to meet up with fellow supra nuts, shoot the shit, and buy some computer parts. I thought it would be a good idea to finally get a new hard drive. I mean, I've got a pretty nice 10k RPM scsi drive, but it's loud. Lately, I'm all about quiet so that sleepy time is not interrupted by my computer. I was ready for the quiet setup, but was missing the HD, 92mm fan, and video card fan. If you've never heard a SCSI drive before picture this - two walnuts being ground together. It's loud! Secondly, I needed an intake fan to blow cool air over the drive to keep it cool. The fan I had was an older Coolermaster fan which is well, awful. And last but certainly the MOST annoying loud is the fan on the video card. This thing was on its way out so I figured hey, let's buy a replacement.
So I get back from Vancouver with a new 320GB Seagate SATA drive, a 92mm Antec fan, and a new 18x DVD burner. I'm stoked - I love goodies
Being an experienced computer nerd, and having dealt with SATA many many times before I knew full well that Windows is the suck. You'd think that by SP2, the ISO's would at least contain SATA drivers for some of the more common chipsets. Negative. So I booted up the Win98 box, downloaded the drivers from the ASUS website and threw it on a diskette. Ripped out that diskette drive, put it in my machine and booted up the XP setup. I get as far as "Loading driver SIL3802" or whatever when the install complains about missing a .sys file. Well I says, wtf is up with that? I take the disk drive out of the system, back into Win98 box and download a different version. Inside this zip, there are no .sys files...wtf? I go to the Silicon Image website and grab their newest version...ok .sys on their tarball. Throw it on the diskette, repeat the process and load the driver. I get to the point during the install where you select your target drives...NOTHING THERE! Oh, I'ma feisty now.
Finally I discovered that my Win98 box is fracked. It wasn't untaring all the files correctly and neglected to even mention anything of the sort. After booting a Gentoo install disk, I use links to download from the asus website, untar, mount the diskette and copy the files. Back into the XP setup and all is well.
Sorta...
Ok, so I now have a fresh install of XP on my SATA drive, but I'd like to get all my data off of my SCSI drive. Apparently neither Windoesn't nor Grub has ANY idea wtf to do about this situation. As soon as both drives are plugged in, I cannot boot from either drive. I tried running the XP recovery console, fixing the MBR...no dice. Every possible combination of BIOS settings...nope. Evnentually I just plugged the damn thing into my Linux server and copied over the network.
What a pain in the ass. And on top of it all, my new DVD burner doesn't even fit inside my Antec P150 case. The pretty little CD-ROM covers are just a bit too small for the CD try to go through...grawrrr!
Last weekend I went over to Vancouver to meet up with fellow supra nuts, shoot the shit, and buy some computer parts. I thought it would be a good idea to finally get a new hard drive. I mean, I've got a pretty nice 10k RPM scsi drive, but it's loud. Lately, I'm all about quiet so that sleepy time is not interrupted by my computer. I was ready for the quiet setup, but was missing the HD, 92mm fan, and video card fan. If you've never heard a SCSI drive before picture this - two walnuts being ground together. It's loud! Secondly, I needed an intake fan to blow cool air over the drive to keep it cool. The fan I had was an older Coolermaster fan which is well, awful. And last but certainly the MOST annoying loud is the fan on the video card. This thing was on its way out so I figured hey, let's buy a replacement.
So I get back from Vancouver with a new 320GB Seagate SATA drive, a 92mm Antec fan, and a new 18x DVD burner. I'm stoked - I love goodies
Being an experienced computer nerd, and having dealt with SATA many many times before I knew full well that Windows is the suck. You'd think that by SP2, the ISO's would at least contain SATA drivers for some of the more common chipsets. Negative. So I booted up the Win98 box, downloaded the drivers from the ASUS website and threw it on a diskette. Ripped out that diskette drive, put it in my machine and booted up the XP setup. I get as far as "Loading driver SIL3802" or whatever when the install complains about missing a .sys file. Well I says, wtf is up with that? I take the disk drive out of the system, back into Win98 box and download a different version. Inside this zip, there are no .sys files...wtf? I go to the Silicon Image website and grab their newest version...ok .sys on their tarball. Throw it on the diskette, repeat the process and load the driver. I get to the point during the install where you select your target drives...NOTHING THERE! Oh, I'ma feisty now.
Finally I discovered that my Win98 box is fracked. It wasn't untaring all the files correctly and neglected to even mention anything of the sort. After booting a Gentoo install disk, I use links to download from the asus website, untar, mount the diskette and copy the files. Back into the XP setup and all is well.
Sorta...
Ok, so I now have a fresh install of XP on my SATA drive, but I'd like to get all my data off of my SCSI drive. Apparently neither Windoesn't nor Grub has ANY idea wtf to do about this situation. As soon as both drives are plugged in, I cannot boot from either drive. I tried running the XP recovery console, fixing the MBR...no dice. Every possible combination of BIOS settings...nope. Evnentually I just plugged the damn thing into my Linux server and copied over the network.
What a pain in the ass. And on top of it all, my new DVD burner doesn't even fit inside my Antec P150 case. The pretty little CD-ROM covers are just a bit too small for the CD try to go through...grawrrr!
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