Joho the Blog
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June 08, 2003
I just spent 30 hours, broken by 4 hours of sleep, rebuilding my desktop computer after my boot disk melted. And now I have to do it all over again. I am sooooo depressed. (I'm writing this from my laptop.) I replaced the bad boot disk with a 180GB monster from Western Digital for $130 after rebate. Big mistake. It requires an ATA board because it's too big for Windows. But I already had an ATA board in because I have 3 drives and 2 CDs. After the usual couple of hours of trial and error, I got the thing up and running, partitioned into two pieces, one of which (a mere 50GB ) I couldn't format. After loading all my software (well, not quite all), rebuilding all the pieces, restoring from my 3 daily backups (yes, I'm totally paranoid), I was in pretty good shape and even managed to work on my keynote at the Jupiter Business Blogging conference tomorrow. In fact, I was feeling so confident that I ran Partition Magic 8 to see if I could get those 50 pesky GBs formatted. As PM started, it told me that some cluster count was being misreported and did I want to fix it. Sure, I said. Kaboom. The 180MB drive is completely hosed. I can't even figure out how to repartition it at this point. PM's boot disk won't fix it. It's a boat anchor. I'm totally at a loss. It's even too late to go out and get another frigging drive. I'm depressed. I can't face another 30 hours of installing and tweaking software. And don't tell me that this wouldn't happen with a Mac you bastards. Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 8, 2003 07:29 PM
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Comments
This wouldn't happen with a Mac
Posted by: Bastard | June 8, 2003 07:37 PM
It's never happened with my Palm Pilot either. ;-)
Posted by: Ken Camp | June 8, 2003 08:20 PM
It's good to have a copy of Knoppix around in cases like this (http://www.knoppix.org). A little late for this time, but burn a copy to CD and you'll be prepared for next time.
Posted by: brent ashley | June 8, 2003 09:34 PM
To fix the drive, you might try downloading the utility software from the drive's support site.
It can do the diagnosis and tell you what's up.
You might need to run the low-level reformat utility that most manufacturers provide somewhere. It puts the drive back in the same condition as when they ship it out.
Good luck.
Posted by: Michael | June 8, 2003 09:37 PM
One more thing, you might try updating your mobo BIOS. The latest BIOS versions can probably handle the 180 GB drive.
Posted by: Michael | June 8, 2003 09:39 PM
Thanks for all the advice. I've been through the manufacturer's site, my BIOS is up to date, I've run several diagnostics and a couple of partitioners, and none can read the disk. (Didn't know about Knoppix though.) I've just begun reloading, retraining the Bayesian filter, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc ....
Thanks anyway. And now it's back to Hell for me...
Posted by: dweinberger | June 8, 2003 10:50 PM
Mmm mmmmm mmmmmph Mmc.
Posted by: AKMA | June 9, 2003 10:48 AM
That's weird! I haven't had the same problems with my iBook with Gentoo installed.
Posted by: Glanz | June 13, 2003 04:33 PM