.plan

A little skimpy on the updates lately?  Yeh?  Well, I’ve been focused on a problem I had.  A computer problem.

Every few years there pops up some sort of computer issue that engulfs hours and hours of my time.  I don’t think I’ve spent this much time trying to get something to work since… I don’t know, trying to get my printer/scanner/copier to actually do all those things at any given moment without needing to power cycle or add/remove kernel modules when switching between printing/scanning? (Linux love)  At least I did get that to work in the end… for the most part (black ink = dark gray ink on the print, yay!!).

Here’s the scenario:  I have an old PC (Athlon XP 2400, 512mb..) with a 160gb hard drive (of which I can only use 120gb without Windows freaking out, but that’s another story).  So, I wanted to put a bigger drive in there because I’m done with burning stuff onto DVDs all the time.  Now, I’m planning on upgrading to a new computer in the next few months, so I want to take this new drive with me, or at least use it as an eSATA backup drive.  And I certainly don’t want to reinstall Windows on this new drive and all my programs and configure all the settings of everything, just to do it all over again in possibly as little as 2 months from now.  So, as foreshadowed, I bought a 1tb SATA drive.  If you want to see the ridiculousness that ensued, read on…

I don’t have any SATA ports on this old son of a bitch, so I also bought a SATA controller card for $20.  A Rosewill one, that had very good ratings.  So I put it all together, boot up, Windows sees the new card, driver install is a snap.  Goodie good.  Then I plug the drive into the controller card, reboot… and…….. nothing.  Nothing after selecting Windows from GRUB that is.  Though hot-plugging it after Windows loads works fine.  Something wrong here!!

Ready for the fun list of bullshit that I tried?:

• Checking my BIOS 80,000 times for any settings indicating boot order that everyone and their mom for some reason thought had to be in there, even though that wouldn’t make any sense being that this is a pre-SATA existance motherboard.  Still, fucked with all the C:/D:/E:/F:/LS120/USB/External settings that DID exist in there (that were NOT under any sort of auto-detection).
• Messed with boot.ini, changing to every setting I could imagine.
• Tried to mess with GRUB under ye ol’ Gentoo Linux.  Decided to try to emerge a newer version of grub.  Gentoo was terribly out of date (a year or so) and emerge –update warned me that I really need to update portage, tried to update portage, wouldn’t install due to a conflict with itself.  Tried to resolve, caused portage to be deleted, no more ‘emerge’ :D  Hey Gentoo, your can-always-update-the-system packaging system is also a FAIL!!
• Burned an Ubuntu disc and booted that (which has no problems booting and seeing all the drives).  Ended up installing Ubuntu, thinking that if it can boot with the drives, it’s gotta be able to write the proper GRUB config/mbr.  Nope!  Actually after that, my PC would hang even before booting into GRUB.  And it was messed up even after disconnecting the drive.  So at this point I had a completely unbootable computer.
• Burned a Windows XP disc and booted that, hoping that maybe fixboot or fixmbr in the recovery console would work.  ADMINISTRATOR PASSWORD!?!?  And none of my passwords are it?  AND I ONLY GET THREE TRIES AND THEN I HAVE TO WAIT TO GO THROUGH LOADING ALL THOSE DRIVERS FOR INSTALLATION AGAIN JUST TO TRY AND GUESS THE PASSWORD SOME MORE!?
  • Burned an Offline NT Password recovery boot disc to clear the damn administrator password.
    • fixboot/fixmbr didn’t fix.
• Tried to uninstall/reinstall the card’s drivers.
• Flashed motherboard BIOS to a beta driver (to later in 2004 than my previous BIOS was).
• Tried to flash my SATA card’s BIOS.
  • Website claimed there was no BIOS.
    • Silicon Image (actual chip-maker)’s site said there was no BIOS available.
      • Clicking a link on the name of the card revealed a page that did indeed have BIOSes available.  Deciphered which of the three (base, raid, or system) I needed to install.
        • Tried to use Windows BIOS flasher utility, but it just gave me output of the bus location and etc, and NONE of the finish codes that allegedly must accompany the program exiting, whether it fails or succeeds, print.
          • There is a DOS BIOS flasher… fuck.. gotta try it.
            • Created a FreeDOS boot floppy, would crash if drive was connected upon boot.
              • Detached drive, booted FreeDOS successfully, ran flasher, IT WOOOORKED!!!  Went up from BIOS version .84 to .85, of which the release notes stated that it fixes not being able to boot the system under certain drive-attachment configurations.  It didn’t fix the problem for me.
• Hit every single combination of keys on the SATA controller’s screen before the OS boots in an attempt to get some sort of settings/boot order menu to appear.
• Called Rosewill tech support.  The lady took my info, and said someone would call me back in 30-45 mins!  I was like “..what?  I’m on my lunch break right now trying to fix this.”  She’s like “oh, would you like to schedule a call for another time?”  “How about 6pm?” “We’re only open from 9am to 5pm”.  I said I’d wait for the call-back.  What the hell, they expect you not to work regular hours if you buy Rosewill hardware or something!?
  • 1hr, 15mins later I call them back since they didn’t call me and I asked where the technician is that’s supposed to call me.  She said “oh, there’s still 2 calls in front of you” and that she doesn’t know how long it’ll take them to get through those two?  I said “…how many people do you have working there??”  She said “two”.
    • I work from home as I await this tech call-back.  Finally it happens about two hours after my original call.  The dude was terribly disappointing.  He was just READING FROM THE DAMN INSTALL MANUAL THAT I HAVE!!!  It seemed like I knew way more about this shit then he did as I told him what I thought the problem was and he told me how to install Windows.  Finally I was like “Well… I thought you’d have some technical expertise as far as the driver goes for this card and some knowledge of how to manipulate it or somehow change the boot order sequence on the card, but I’ll just go back to trying to figure it out myself.”  His response was “Yeah, that’s probably your best bet.”  Phewww..
• Reinstalled Ubuntu with some different settings as for where to write the mbr.  Basically trying to just put the mbr/GRUB on the SATA drive and have it point to the IDE drive for OS’s, wondering if Windows still finds it unacceptable for itself not to be on hd0.
• Messed with the GRUB hd mapping.
• Burned a Super Grub Disc and booted off of it, trying to create a proper grub file and dictate which drive to boot off of, drive swapping, etc, none of it worked.
• Tried to do the Windows boot disc, detect windows is already installed, and fix the installation deal, which required me to load the SATA driver onto a boot floppy to go along with the Windows boot disc.  Installing the driver off the floppy upon windows setup does indeed cause the system to recognize the drive, but fixing the install still didn’t fix the blank-boot problem.
  • Not only did it not fix it, I didn’t know that it was going to basically reinstall the windows subsystem completely.  So now I’m back on SP2!!
    • Trying to upgrade back to SP3 yeilds me with an “Access Denied” error, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Finally I gave up.  Why did I keep going?  Because after about hour 4, I kept feeling like I’m 90% of the way there and I might as well figure it out and there’s not much left to do, though I kept thinking of things to try.

I’ll just plug the fucker in everytime I boot for this intermediate computer period.  *sigh*, what a fucking waste of time.  I’m reminded of something that my father, who bravely spent hours in the trenches battling with config.sys and autoexec.bat in the DOS days, said in regards to the PC: “Luke, they’ve created a MONSTER.”