Saturday, October 25, 2008

Someone Remind Me to Never Upgrade My Hardware

Please. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I bought a 500 gigabyte drive today at the computer shop. It was so cheap at 5000 yen (roughly 50 bucks) I couldn't help myself. Then I got home, and realized I really didn't NEED a new harddrive, and although my intent was noble (good riddance IDE, hello SATA and the new frontier of fast hard drives!), apparently I had already come to this conclusion long ago, and just didn't remember doing so. The drive I intended to replace was apparently ALREADY an SATA drive, and it's meager 350 gb was doing just fine. Room to spare on every partition, and a Seagate Barracuda, just like the one I patted myself on the back for buying today. Short term memory loss and hardware purchases go hand in hand like peanut butter and arsenic, I suppose.

Act 2 commences, with me deciding that a 32MB buffer (!) is going to make load times a thing of that past, and to create a new clone of my OLD HD, plus a fancy new GAMES partition on the new one.

Enter Norton Ghost. Or HDclone. Or Live Linux boot CD distributions made expressly for HD copying. I swear I tried (and cancelled) about 12 different options before I finally just gave up and realized YES IT'S GOING TO TAKE FUCKING FOREVER to clone my main HD. I think the problem arises from the fact that the last time I used any of these tools was when 40 gb was a big drive, and god damn if this isn't taking forever. A watched progress bar never fills, etc etc, but seriously. I'm typing this up on the laptop just to keep myself from staring at the current (and final, I surrender) implementation (Clonezilla!) slowly trickle from 49.72% to 50.

In the end, I suppose I will finally eliminate the final IDE drive (a dummy slave filled with MP3s and the like) from my system, freeing it up to go in my old P.O.S. Dell always-on box that handles media serving etc, but is having two SATA drives coming to over 800gb worth it in the end? I submit that... okay, it probably is ;). I might have been happier to just go for the full 1 TB drive (and a clean install of Windows), but I just love complaining whenever my computer is unavailable for its express #1 purpose of gaming. /sigh... 58.50% and climbing, and that's only my XP partition... bleeeeehhhhhh... ten bucks says when this operation finally completes, it still doesn't boot since the MBR for my main drive is some wonky vista / xp dual boot whosamawhatzit. :(

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

My recommendation is to run XP, and if you really want to use Vista on occasion just VM that.

Rich said...

I basically do just run XP. The Vista partition sits there unused, but the option to boot into a full blown vista install is there if I want to do something like verify that AoC and their "native DirectX 10 support" is basically a load of crap.

Anonymous said...

For cloning drives I would recommend using Acronis.

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