Milk's computer upgrade and trials

[Milkrunner]

Oookay, so here's the story.

Until recently Old Bessie had been chugging along just fine, and then one day normal processes started taking up more and more CPU bandwidth and RAM was seriously showing it's age. After an interesting PR battle with Scriv and Angry, it worked fine for another couple hours and then just stopped booting into my main windows install. That sucked, but I had just backed everything up to my brand spanking new external HD (in order for Bessie to get through the PR match with Scriv and Angry, so I guess I'm going to thank Scriv for saving me from a heart attack), and I have a recovery partition kicking around in the case that that scenario would occur..

Anywho, I checked my HDDs, and they seem to be fine (no bad sectors, etc.), so my OS must have been corrupt. The CPU and RAM were just as useless on my recovery partition as on my main partition, so that's a hardware problem. My solution is as follows:

-"Darik's Boot and Nuke" the HDDs to hopefully fix the residual MBR problem I was having. (100%, 4hrs)

The reason I used Darik's Boot and Nuke was because it zeroes the drive rather than just "formats" it, so it's, theoretically, completely empty. The thing is, it takes forever to do, and I used the "quick" feature, which just does one pass with a "quick" algorithm, rather than the 36 passes with an in-depth algorithm (or some-such). One thing I found was that my drives went from 42000(bps?) to 29000(bps?) in about an hour, which kind of worried me, as my test on the HDDs hadn't taken time into consideration. On the other hand, when I went back to check them 2 hours later, they were hovering at 39000 pretty stably.

-Install Windows XP SP2 (100%)

Already had some trouble here. I partitioned a portion of the first drive for Windows, but when I told it to install it said that it wasn't a compatible partition. ... But the partition was completely blank. Did I brick my HDDs? No, apparently Windows just doesn't like having 2 HDDs in at the same time. I disconnected my slave HDD and it all went smoothly, though it took me 20 minutes to figure out the problem. Bad start, but not irrecoverable. Windows networking is annoying.

-Dual-boot Ubuntu Linux on the same HDD. (I like GRUB + figure I can't corrupt my Windows partition as bad if I use Ubuntu for multimedia+text editing+surfing, Windows just for gaming and Windows-specific junk). (100%)

Well, apparently the zeroing fixed the MBR problem, and Ubuntu installed without a hitch. I've yet to try using wireless (my closest phone outlet it pretty far away, and I don't want to buy a ridiculously long ethernet cable..) which is a pain in the ass with most linux distros, so we'll see how that words. Either way, dual boots windows/ubuntu without any trouble. So, wireless and re-hooking the other HDD to see if everything works, and then waiting on the new parts.

-Install new parts/drivers.

Went fine, except it screwed up my bootloader, so I had to reinstall the fairly empty Ubuntu OS.

-Install BF2/PR/Patches.

Worked fine, actually

-Get revenge on Scriv for the truck fiasco. (To be accomplished).

This post is mostly so that when I get to the troubleshooting phases, Rob can save me hours of time I should be spending studying.

[deadaim88]

Good luck Milk, I hate doing this kinda stuff!

[Milkrunner]

Ubuntu is pretty neat. It's a different feel entirely than Windows, and once you get used to doing some of the stranger stuff (like downloading/installing ... everything ... from the command line, e.g., want a gmail notifier for linux? sudo apt-get install checkgmail. That worked? Want an IM client? sudo apt-get install aMSN. Once I found that out, I was very happy.)

My parts came in this evening, btw, and I'll be all set up by tomorrow evening around 5 EST. I downloaded (again) the latest BF2 patch and the PR files (this time saved on my backup external HDD), but I'm going to actually install it once I have all of my new drivers installed with the hardware to avoid any directX problems or what-have-you.