All you need is just a little patience...
When upgrading computers (more accurately, putting bits of an old one into a new one and getting it all up and running and transferring all the data across), you need knowledge, experience, a screwdriver and most importantly - lots and lots of patience. You also need to keep thinking of ways around a problem when you are thwarted at every turn.
Case in point; my mum's computer was running slow. It's several years old now and I suggested that rather than buying more RAM, that she buy a new PC. For £250 she could get a barebones system far more powerful than her current one, with a new hard disk and a DVD-writer as well. She agreed to this so I ordered the bits. This weekend I went over to put them in, armed with my laptop, a screwdriver and several CD's, including the one I made back in November to get Ele's dad's Windows XP OEM product key to work with my retail upgrade CD.
First step, remove the floppy drive from the old PC and put it in the new one. The new hard disk is a SATA drive, which means you have to give XP a floppy with a driver on it to get it to see it. So I take the old floppy drive out and put it in the new one, and install the new hard disk and DVD writer. Fine. Then I look for the driver disk. Only there isn't one. You have to create it yourself from the motherboard CD.
Sigh... putting the floppy drive back in and booting the old machine is not a possibility, beacuse that machine takes about 20 mins to boot up and become usable. My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, and neither does my mum's laptop. My mum then realised that my sister's laptop has one, so we got that and put the motherboard CD in. Only it wouldn't read it. Taking it out revealed the problem - an inch-long crack in it.
So I pulled out my laptop and connected to the wireless network that someone local had kindly given me permission to use. By this I mean "failed to secure", of course. Only the network wasn't there, like it normally is. Eventually I discovered that moving my laptop to the kitchen window got a signal from it. A quick search gave me the SATA drivers, along with everything else on the CD like the video drivers, etc. I downloaded the SATA drivers and copied them to my USB key, transferred this to my sister's laptop and extracted the files.
They extracted to a folder called NVRAID. In here, was another folder called NVRAID. Inside that one, was another folder called NVRAID. I was getting severe Russian-doll syndrome and wondering if I was stuck inside some infinite loop, but then hit a folder called Raid Floppy. Inside there was another folder called 32-bit. Inside there, my quest was complete and the .exe file was found. I ran it and it said:
The data of the disk will be of the formatting! Irrevocable data loss will be occuring on the Driver A:!
Very Engrish. So I created the disk, plugged in the new PC and started the XP setup. Then I got distracted and forgot to hit F6 to give Setup the drivers. So it was a big suprise when Setup could see the hard-disk anyway, and I didn't actually need the disk after all.
Argh.
Apparantly the motherboard does some trickery, making a SATA drive appear as a normal IDE drive. This is the same motherboard that I put in Arthur's new PC, and that didn't do this, so I guess it's a newer BIOS or something.
Anyway, the rest of it went smoothly and no further irritations ensued. Gotta love computers.
BOOTNOTE - I've just come out of a meeting, and in an attempt to stop people using permanant markers on the dry-erase board, somebody had written "Do not use non-permanant markers on this board!" Not quite sure they got that right...
Case in point; my mum's computer was running slow. It's several years old now and I suggested that rather than buying more RAM, that she buy a new PC. For £250 she could get a barebones system far more powerful than her current one, with a new hard disk and a DVD-writer as well. She agreed to this so I ordered the bits. This weekend I went over to put them in, armed with my laptop, a screwdriver and several CD's, including the one I made back in November to get Ele's dad's Windows XP OEM product key to work with my retail upgrade CD.
First step, remove the floppy drive from the old PC and put it in the new one. The new hard disk is a SATA drive, which means you have to give XP a floppy with a driver on it to get it to see it. So I take the old floppy drive out and put it in the new one, and install the new hard disk and DVD writer. Fine. Then I look for the driver disk. Only there isn't one. You have to create it yourself from the motherboard CD.
Sigh... putting the floppy drive back in and booting the old machine is not a possibility, beacuse that machine takes about 20 mins to boot up and become usable. My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, and neither does my mum's laptop. My mum then realised that my sister's laptop has one, so we got that and put the motherboard CD in. Only it wouldn't read it. Taking it out revealed the problem - an inch-long crack in it.
So I pulled out my laptop and connected to the wireless network that someone local had kindly given me permission to use. By this I mean "failed to secure", of course. Only the network wasn't there, like it normally is. Eventually I discovered that moving my laptop to the kitchen window got a signal from it. A quick search gave me the SATA drivers, along with everything else on the CD like the video drivers, etc. I downloaded the SATA drivers and copied them to my USB key, transferred this to my sister's laptop and extracted the files.
They extracted to a folder called NVRAID. In here, was another folder called NVRAID. Inside that one, was another folder called NVRAID. I was getting severe Russian-doll syndrome and wondering if I was stuck inside some infinite loop, but then hit a folder called Raid Floppy. Inside there was another folder called 32-bit. Inside there, my quest was complete and the .exe file was found. I ran it and it said:
The data of the disk will be of the formatting! Irrevocable data loss will be occuring on the Driver A:!
Very Engrish. So I created the disk, plugged in the new PC and started the XP setup. Then I got distracted and forgot to hit F6 to give Setup the drivers. So it was a big suprise when Setup could see the hard-disk anyway, and I didn't actually need the disk after all.
Argh.
Apparantly the motherboard does some trickery, making a SATA drive appear as a normal IDE drive. This is the same motherboard that I put in Arthur's new PC, and that didn't do this, so I guess it's a newer BIOS or something.
Anyway, the rest of it went smoothly and no further irritations ensued. Gotta love computers.
BOOTNOTE - I've just come out of a meeting, and in an attempt to stop people using permanant markers on the dry-erase board, somebody had written "Do not use non-permanant markers on this board!" Not quite sure they got that right...
posted by Nej at
1:47 pm
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