I Live! (And so does my computer…)

Well, that was not a lot of fun. I decided after I ran Master Plan to the airport this morning, to bite the bullet and re-install my operating system. The computer had been acting a bit wonky for the last couple of months, and I’d never gotten it to recognize the drives properly after installing the 400GB Seagate last year.

So of course that ended up biting me in the ass, when I told Windows 2k Setup (yes, 2k, not XP, and sure as hell not Vista) to delete drive D:. See, that’s my boot drive… or is supposed to be. I had C: (80GB, slowly going bad), D: (40GB, old but just fine) and F:/G:/H: (1x 400GB w/3 partitions). E: was the DVD. D: and F: were supposed to be boot drives, with C also having the O/S but missing key boot files (legacy reasons, I retired it as a boot drive when it got screwy). After the system issues I had a couple of months ago, I deleted the system files on C: completely, and booted from F:, which was a several-months old copy of D:. For some strange reason, until I did that, Win2k had never acknowledged that F: was a boot drive.

With me so far?

Yeah, I think it’s confusing too. So I decided to finally do something about it before I installed a new program. The system had been locking up for a second or two at times, and running slowly. Plus with all the programs I had installed and removed over the last two or three years, who knows what crap was crowding up the memory at startup? So, a couple of weeks ago, I removed all the key files that I wanted to save from C: and D:, and I wiped C completely. Today, it was finally time to delete my boot on D:, reinstall, and then wipe the boot on F:. The plan was to be left with only one bootable drive, and that would be the newly re-partitioned and reformatted D:. Only Windows Setup didn’t agree with me as to the drive assignments. When I told it to delete partition D:, it deleted F:!

This is what’s known as “a real bummer.” Guess where I’d put many of the files I’d removed from C: and D:? Guess where my emails were? Guess where many of my savegames were? Guess where many, many files I’d created and stored in “My Documents” were?

Yeah. Well, my sinuses have been giving me hell lately, and I must have been utterly doped up on the drugs or something, because I didn’t lose my temper, or break anything, or even rant. I just went, “Oh well, that figures!” and started removing the C: drive on the theory that maybe the disk wasn’t bad, but the controller was, and it was confusing Win2K setup. It wasn’t reporting the rest of the partitions correctly anyway. As I went about resetting the jumpers, another seemingly unrelated item came into play. A month ago, I bought new reading glasses–bifocals. I could now read, for the first time in about five years, the ultra-teeny-tiny microscopic print on the top of the hard drives. And in doing so, I found that the reason Win2k was confused was that I had the jumpers set to “Master/Slave” whereas I had an Ultra ATA cable in use and should have them set to “Cable Select.” And of course they were attached the opposite of what they should be, so the Setup & boot saw it one way, but once the full O/S loaded, 2k saw and reported the other.

Wow. If I had brain, I be dangerous. But now what’s with the setup still not recognizing the 400GB drive? At this point, my lack of sleep (and surplus of druggage) from sinus issues caught up to me and I decided to sleep on it. After my nap, I remembered that Win2k can’t see over 137GB on a drive because it uses 24-bit addressing. From that point on, it was just a matter of re-installing, finding drivers, updating, installing more, rinse, repeat. And now I’m back in operation again, and booting off of drive C: (the old 40GB) like a normal person. Sans all my software for doing complicated HTML, editing pictures, watching DVD’s, watching fansubs, playing games… Sigh. So much work, so little time.

Obviously, posting will be slow for a spell. Console yourself with my updated anime list, now including almost all of the fansubs, and many series I’ve never done a full review on.