Almost New Hard Disks

I broke my computer. I've never completely broken a computer before. I've had hard disks die. I've had video cards go all funky. But last night I completely broke it.

 

I was installing my new hard drives. I was all expecting to blog about my snazzy new photo storage, but I didn't finish the install. This was my plan. I purchased 2 200 gig hard disks. One goes in an older computer and the other goes in my main computer. I put all my photos, music, and docs on the new hard disk. Then I can copy the data over to keep the hard disks in sync. I was planning on finding a way to use xcopy or something that would only copy the new or changed files. Then I could setup a scheduled task to copy the files each night. Then when one hard disk failed, I didn't loose all my data.

 

I put my first hard disk into the old computer. Did you know that computers get mad when you put a disk bigger than 137 gigs in them? Man these stupid computer people. Every few year hard disks blow away the size limits. You'd think that after the first few times the people would have wised up and said, "Ya know, I think we should make the limit be 1 billion billion gigabytes." But instead they said, "I can save 10 bits! Wahoo. Who's ever gonna make a hard disk that's over 137 gigabytes?!?" So the hard disk manufactures have to solve this problem. You have to run a disk manager program before you install the hard disk. Then shutdown the computer and install the new disk. Turn on and run disk manager again and it tell you I can only do 137 gigs. Hmmm. I rebooted to look through my bios settings since the manual said something about bios. No luck. So then I ran disk manager again and now it asked if I would like to enable the 200 gig feature. Wahoo. It then did a quick format and partition and stuff and all was good. I think that after the hard disk is installed you need to reboot because it put its magic in the boot sector.

 

A happy note on new hard disks. They solved the jumper problem. You don't need to set jumpers on hard disks any more. The IDE plug has a black connector for primary and a gray connector for slave.

 

I copied all my photos and music over to my new hard disk. My plan which worked well was to copy the data to a new hard disk first then install a second hard disk in the primary computer. This way if anything went wrong I always had the data on a least one computer. Yeah, that was a good call.

 

So then I tried to install the hard disk in the new computer. I put it in and turned the computer on and nothing happened. D'oh. No fans, no lights, nothing. Then I opened it up and spent the next 1.5 hours trying to get the computer to do something. When I plug the power cord in I get a little LED on the mother board, but that's it. I checked all the connections. I removed the new hard disk. I removed the video card. I tried to shortcut circuit the power button since I thought I might have broken the switch. I removed the mother board looking for screws. Here's a little bit of genius. There are screws for the motherboard under the CPU heat sync. You have to remove the CPU to remove the mother board. The CPU is in a ZIF socket so it has a lever. You can't operate the lever when there is a heat sync on the CPU. So you have to pop the heat sync of the CPU to reinstall it on the mother board. Yeah great. Now if my computer were working I have to find some heat sync paste to reattach the heat sync. But my computer still isn't working. I broke it. So my guess is that it's the mother board. Can you buy a replacement mother board from Dell? Well I guess I'll figure that out today. I might just buy a whole new computer because I'm not sure exactly which part is broken. By the time I buy and motherboard and CPU I doubt it's much cheaper than a whole new computer. Fun, fun.