Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Turning an Aging Computer into a Media Center - Part 2 - The hard drive
My Dell came with a 40GB hard drive, plus I have an 80GB drive I got a few years ago because our music library seems to grow exponentially. (This is mathematically untrue, but it seems true.) For Media Center purposes, it isn’t enough. I’ll need tons of room not just for TV recordings but for ripping my DVDs as well. It’ll be nice to be able to browse through them without dragging out the massive movie folder.
The biggest IDE hard hard drive I was able to find was 750GB. I lucked out and managed to find one on sale for $109 at my local Fry’s Electronics. I felt triumphant, especially when I looked the next day the price had jumped back up to $189!
Installation should have been easy. In a way it was. But all the unsuccessful and unecessary putzing around I did to get the stupid PCI video card to work really screwed things up for me. What did it was upgrading my BIOS. The version I had was A02. I thought maybe a more recent version would offer better video card options, so I upgraded to version A06. Imagine my disappointment when it looked almost exactly the same with only a couple of minor differences. Instead of helping me, what it did was cause my two DVD drives to no longer be recognized. They were now “unknown devices”.
I didn’t realize this until after I swapped out my C: drive for the new one and was ready to install Windows XP Media Center 2004. Imagine my consternation when I pushed the button for one of the drives and absolutely nothing happened? It was weird. What I ended up having to do to correct it was to unplug all my IDE drives from the motherboard, turn on the PC, clear the NVRAM by hitting Alt-F, turn off the PC, plug in the hard drives, turn it on… oh fuck it. I followed the steps here, though I skipped the stupid part about the hard drive jumpers (what the hell is “cable select”?).
So I did all that and finally my DVD drives were working again and I installed Windows. The end result? Somehow my 80GB music-filled hard drive became the C: drive and Windows got installed F: drive. WTF??? One stupid thing after another! FUCKING DELL BIOS I BLAME YOU. What I should have done was plug each hard drive in individually instead of both at once. It likely recognized the wrong one first, which doesn’t make sense to me. The new drive was master and the 80GB was the slave. At least I think so… jumpers are annoying. I’ll have to check that.
Anyway, I renumbered the drives so that there is no C: drive at all now, to save confusion later. It’s really fucked up and I’m tempted to redo the whole thing. Will having no C: drive cause me any problems? It hasn’t yet, but I don’t know.
Moral of this story? Never upgrade your BIOS unless you are absolutely sure it is needed to make something work.
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Categories: • Random acts of geekery