I have a 250GB USB hard drive on which I ‘back up’ different types of media that I regularly use with my PC; MP3s, images of magazine cover disks, images of game disks, images of all the software I’ve ever bought. And, of course, all the license keys and serial numbers. That way, I can archive (throw away) the CDs and their cases, and use virtual drive software to mount the images. I don’t have to keep dozens of otherwise useless software boxes lying around, I don’t have to keep changing CDs to play games, and everything is there at my fingertips.
Last night I discovered Windows XP will happily install onto a USB hard drive.
Without warning.
Well, I claim “without warning”, but I think I really mean “the warning was there, but I knew what I was doing so I ignored it”. Yes, that’s what I mean.
After having finally transferred all my stuff to my new PC, it was time to rebuild my old one and give it to Charlie, as promised. But a series of events conspired against me–including my failure to disconnect the external drive–and the Windows XP installer didn’t recognise the RAID array; so it decided to install on said USB device instead.
The drive was nearly full, and I lost it all.
I suppose it buys me some time before I have to decide what to do when the drive runs out of space.
I’ve recently emerged from the other side of building a new PC, an act which proved to be rather more painful than could have been reasonably expected. I’m experienced enough to know what I’m doing–I built my first PC when a 30 MB hard drive was more than adequate for a home computer–but this time round I suddenly appreciated the advantages of buying from somewhere like Dell.
It took a little while to unpack all the parts, throw the packaging into the corner of the room, and put it all together. And then I was ready for that nervous moment, the first power-up of a freshly-built computer! I pressed the power button, and… nothing. Bugger.
All was not lost, however – a little diagnostic accessory on the motherboard promised insight through its four little LEDs. Each LED can glow green or red, and the combination of lights indicates the stage at which the start-up process failed.
It’s basically a shining diagnostic thing. A shining, LYING, diagnostic thing. Except I didn’t know it was lying at the time. It was pointing at the RAM, saying “Ummm, I’m telliiiiiiiiing”. All the while, the CPU chuckled at getting the RAM into trouble.
After the purchase of a small (and thankfully cheap) stick of different RAM, I cottoned on to the shining diagnostic thing’s game, and stumbled across the CPU’s troublemaking. The bastards. In frustrated anger I did something–I really don’t know what–and it started playing properly.
A few more niggles later–Windows Vista 64-bit blue-screening with 4GB of RAM, the on-board audio causing lock-ups, and having to RMA one of the hard drives–my computer is up and running. I daren’t think how many times I reinstalled Windows!
And it only took two weeks(!)