Techie updates
I managed to tear myself off Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Beta 2 today to head down to the local mall to pick up a new hard disk for my old computer. I rummaged through my old tech parts stockpile and found out that I had probably discarded that 10 GB drives some time ago. It is some what more expensive to buy at the local mall, but I didn't want to run all the way down to the electronics hub just for a hard disk. After some browsing, I picked up a 250GB Western Digital SATA hard disk.
I brought it back home, took out my old hard disk, which is definitely faulty. When I took it out, I could hear an ominous "click-clack" noise of something shifting inside it. I guess the first platter head must be came loose completely or the motors failed.
It was a quick and easy operation to swap the hard disk, but after I powered it up, Vista, Ubuntu and XP all failed to recognize the hard disk. I then realized that the bootup screen seemed to appear a lot faster and that I'm probably missing the RAID controller screen.
I swapped cables, swapped ports to try and figure out what's wrong but to no avail. Then, out of desperation, I plugged in my old drive in again, confirmed the missing RAID controller screen. Finally, a quick google search later turned out that the aging VT8237 RAID controller doesn't support SATA-II speeds on the Western Digital drive, and I had to squeeze in a jumper on the hard disk to force it to run at SATA-I. The hard disk did not come with any jumpers, so I nicked one off a decommissioned motherboard that was lying around, and viola, it worked at last.
And I caved in and dropped Vista on it, just to work out the new UI features in case I'm asked to support the OS in the future. After 15 minutes, I feel like uninstalling it already. Gods, is the new security feature annoying! Thankfully, I had already left some empty hard disk space Ubuntu, and I think I'll be sticking to that. Still, I've plenty of applications and configurations to load on it though, and will probably take me another few more days.
Now, to get back to rekindling some good old school FPS fun... KILL THE HUMAN FOOD!