Brett_H
Second Unit
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2001
- Messages
- 341
All,
Just an update on this one.
In short: total crash and burn. 0 success. All due to the limitation of my Compaq pc, which I should have seen coming.
What was I trying to do? Well, as I mentioned inthis thread, I scored a sweet deal on a pair of Western Digital 40 Gig drives. I figured I'd be able to put them in my existing Compaq PC and be off and running. I can hear you all laughing now, and with good reason. I was a complete moron for even thinking this could be done...
To make things more interesting, I decided to buy a Promise ATA100 controller card to take "full advantage" of the speed of the drives. For $30 I figured I couldn't go wrong...HA!
Problems?
No available PCI slots. Had to remove 3DFX 16 MB video card to install Promise ATA100 controller card. Not cool, but since I don't play games I wasn't that concerned about falling back on the built-in video.
No room in case for additional hard drive. This was a little tougher to swallow, but I figured at this point I could just image the OEM drive to one of the WD drives and use 1 drive for now... WRONG for reasons explained below!
No additional power sources for additional drives. Had to unplug the OEM CD drive to even get power to a 2nd HDD while I tried to image/format it. Not an acceptable long term solution.
I eventually unhooked both CD drives so that I could hook the OEM HDD to IDE channel 1 and the new drive to IDE channel 2. This, I thought, would at least let me image the original drive.
Oh, and did I mention that I wanted to accomplish this WITHOUT having to reinstall W2K? Read on...
I'm using Windows 2000 with NTFS. Silly me for assuming Western Digital could write a program to deal with this. Turns out I couldn’t use Western Digital's drive imaging utility to copy the OEM drive.
I had a copy of Ghost that I borrowed from work, so I tried to copy the OEM drive using that. After 15 minutes, it said it was done. So I removed the OEM drive, hooked up the new drive as master on IDE channel #1, and tried to boot. I got as far as the Win2K splash screen before it bluescreen'd with an inaccessible boot device error.
At this point, I threw in the towel for the day and decided to get it back to normal, minus the video card.
So now my options are as follows:
1. Install the new hard drive as the only hard drive in the system, and install Win2K along will all of my apps from scratch.
2. Buy a new (or used) mobo and case and transfer my existing Processor, RAM, hard drives, CD, CD-R, video, and sound over to that. Buy a NIC while I'm at it since my current PC at least has an onboard NIC that can be used with my DSL.
3. Same as #2 except go all out and get a new processor to go along with it all.
Options 1 and 3 sound the most likely, since my processor isn't all that (AMD K6-2 500) and the case is totally full as it is. It's beginning to look like the "deal" I got on those drives is going to cost me a lot more in the end!
OK, rant over. If anyone out there has any used hardware I should be aware of, I'd love to know about it!
Thanks for listening,
-Brett.
Just an update on this one.
In short: total crash and burn. 0 success. All due to the limitation of my Compaq pc, which I should have seen coming.
What was I trying to do? Well, as I mentioned inthis thread, I scored a sweet deal on a pair of Western Digital 40 Gig drives. I figured I'd be able to put them in my existing Compaq PC and be off and running. I can hear you all laughing now, and with good reason. I was a complete moron for even thinking this could be done...
To make things more interesting, I decided to buy a Promise ATA100 controller card to take "full advantage" of the speed of the drives. For $30 I figured I couldn't go wrong...HA!
Problems?
No available PCI slots. Had to remove 3DFX 16 MB video card to install Promise ATA100 controller card. Not cool, but since I don't play games I wasn't that concerned about falling back on the built-in video.
No room in case for additional hard drive. This was a little tougher to swallow, but I figured at this point I could just image the OEM drive to one of the WD drives and use 1 drive for now... WRONG for reasons explained below!
No additional power sources for additional drives. Had to unplug the OEM CD drive to even get power to a 2nd HDD while I tried to image/format it. Not an acceptable long term solution.
I eventually unhooked both CD drives so that I could hook the OEM HDD to IDE channel 1 and the new drive to IDE channel 2. This, I thought, would at least let me image the original drive.
Oh, and did I mention that I wanted to accomplish this WITHOUT having to reinstall W2K? Read on...
I'm using Windows 2000 with NTFS. Silly me for assuming Western Digital could write a program to deal with this. Turns out I couldn’t use Western Digital's drive imaging utility to copy the OEM drive.
I had a copy of Ghost that I borrowed from work, so I tried to copy the OEM drive using that. After 15 minutes, it said it was done. So I removed the OEM drive, hooked up the new drive as master on IDE channel #1, and tried to boot. I got as far as the Win2K splash screen before it bluescreen'd with an inaccessible boot device error.
At this point, I threw in the towel for the day and decided to get it back to normal, minus the video card.
So now my options are as follows:
1. Install the new hard drive as the only hard drive in the system, and install Win2K along will all of my apps from scratch.
2. Buy a new (or used) mobo and case and transfer my existing Processor, RAM, hard drives, CD, CD-R, video, and sound over to that. Buy a NIC while I'm at it since my current PC at least has an onboard NIC that can be used with my DSL.
3. Same as #2 except go all out and get a new processor to go along with it all.
Options 1 and 3 sound the most likely, since my processor isn't all that (AMD K6-2 500) and the case is totally full as it is. It's beginning to look like the "deal" I got on those drives is going to cost me a lot more in the end!
OK, rant over. If anyone out there has any used hardware I should be aware of, I'd love to know about it!
Thanks for listening,
-Brett.