appeasing the inner geek

 So, I woke up pretty late today – probably shouldn’t have had that coffee while I geeked around with the computer last night.

I made more coffee and got online to Fry’s dot com and found the parts and cables I’d need, and took apart the computer so it was waiting on the table for me to get home with the goods.

The Solid State Drive I bought yesterday needed a SATA data cable; the power supply I bought a while back has all the power connecters I’ll ever need, so I didn’t really need that 4-pin to flat SATA power connector that I bought anyway.

(ya never know, it might come in handy)

I found the exact SATA data cable I needed; one with a right angle connector on it to clear obstructions in the computer case (another reason to open it up before I went shopping).  In fact, I bought 2 of those cables, because SATA hard drives are the "now" thing, and my computer’s use of IDE drives shows it’s age.  Someone gave be a 120Gb SATA laptop drive – a 2.5 inch wide drive as compared to the standard desktop size of 3.5 inches.  I bought an aluminum enclosure – a box – for it and have been using it for a USB drive.

I’m thinking that now I have what I would need to use it as an internal drive….

A couple of years ago, I bought my first USB drive; the laptop drive made for the second USB drive, and I got a 2Tb USB drive in March.  I’ve got plenty of storage space; multiple duplicates of everything.

The C drive on this machine is the original drive; I got it in 2006, near as I can remember (oh, but I’m sure I wrote about it on OD – it is a diary too).  The C drive is OLD – that was part of the reason to get USB drives to keep things backed up, but yesterday, I said to myself "I’m going to replace the C drive with the same size Solid State Drive – fast – and new", and I bought a 32 Gb SSD for less than a 100Mb USB drive cost me in the 00’s.

Score!

I thought.

Got home yesterday and realized that I could not use anything I bought.

Ohhh shit.

Long story shorter, I got a quick education on SATA drives and IDE drives (cuz I COULD get online and read about stuff) and I took apart my machine again to look in it and to think about things and found out that I CAN use that SSD; I just needed some cables.  The plan was to take out the second hard drive in the machine; bought used but newer than the C drive, and to replace it with the SSD drive.  I knew I had some Seagate HD tools and coud clone the C drive and then use the SSD to replace the C drive.

Simple.

I thought.

One drive out, another one in and I booted up, no problem, only to to find that those Seagate Tools won’t work if I don’t have any Seagate Drives inside the computer; the D drive that I took out was my "key" to using that cloning program.

Using MSN tools, the disk is formatted and recognised and is empty, ready to fill, but I don’t know how to clone the C drive – I just clicked on things in that Seagate program.

I’m thinking that I could take the C drive out, install the laptop drive I’m using now as a USB drive, and just reformat the whole thing on the new drives.

I think I have to mess around with the BIOS settings to make SATA drives boot instead of IDE, like now.

It does show the SSD SATA drive in Computer Mnagement in Windows… so I don’t really know one way or the other.

It’s quite possible I dunno shit… but the computer is still working, so I must not have messed up too badly yet.

Computers are kind of like cars – you don’t want your everyday driver being your project car – ya gotta get around.

I wanna get online, and fear not being able to, so I’m like, totally cautious with this computer stuff.

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Oh, by the way, I do have the motherboard’s manual, and some other printed reference materials, and I do think I know something about this stuff… probably just enough to really screw things up.

Pessimissism, or preparation.  Either way, it’s Proceed with Caution, eh?

 

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