Is it just me or is this sort of a pain in the tukas and crazy ass crazy? Another long-winded story/question for the PC-gods who lurk here:
I bought a new mobo/AMD Sempron combo to calm the demons in me that make me upgrade. I'd been exploring using a PC to interface directly with the home theatre. And so I did the big switcheroo placing the newest m/b in my work PC, the next oldest in my game PC and the old busta gear goes in my experimental theatre PC. Took a little tweaking and there was that graphics card power problem, but I got the gaming PC (running Win98SE) to see things my way. The theatre PC was using a leftover 8GB drive just to see if it would even work. It did. Splendidly even. Eventually. Again with a little tweaking. Then I fired up my work PC.
Oooops. Ok, so I use a Mac most of the time. I didn't realize this was a really dumb thing to do. Apparently the Win 2K doesn't like you to switch the m/b and let's you know this using the friendly interface above. After several hours of finding this out on the intarweb, I realized what was happening (and you said I'd just come straight here...)
And so, being the incredibly clever (not to mention handsome and charming) guy I am, I figured I'd just drop the old drive in the theatre PC (the new home of the old m/b) and then have access to all those installers and documents and gaming mods and other dumb stuff. And, actually, that worked. I was able to get a bunch of installers over to my gaming PC (whose HD I'd cleverly erased while upgrading to a larger drive).
So I figured I'd just do a clean install of Win 2K on a WD 160GB drive I hadn't done anything with. The old install (and it was old) had gotten gunked up with some adware from Kazaa (before I knew) and an SBC install disk their company is trying to forget. With a little effort, this was done. Except that Win2K Pro (no SPs) doesn't recognize drives larger than 120GB. I didn't even want to install this disk in this machine in the first place. After mucking about in the BIOS and spending hours on the internet I was finally able to figure out what had happened.
After scratching my head and reading about a dozen ill-advised workarounds, I decided to use my Win98SE rescue disk to run fdisk to delete the NTFS partition (thanks M$!). It seemed to recognize that my drive was bigger than that and so I had it make a primary DOS partition. And then rebooted with the Win2K Pro CD and did a new install. That took all of last night and I figured either it would see the drive as 120GB and do all that over again or it would recognize that it was much bigger than it originally thought and work right.
And after much to do, today it says the drive has a capacity of 149GB. I'm not sure if that's what it should be, but that's more than 120GB last I checked. What I'm wondering is whether the PC gurus here might know a better way of doing all this. Maybe even something I can do before I re-install all my old shit. Because this seems like it was a hyuuuuge pain and way more complicated than it needed to be. (Did I mention that last month I installed a processor upgrade in my five-year-old G4 thus trippling it's clockspeed and it just worked right away?) Any insights you could lend would be appreciated. As well as letting me know if that 149GB capacity sounds right.
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Woah.
OK, so, like, to quell your fears right away and put those demons to sleep again: a 160GB drive is really only around 150GB in size. It's a byte thing.
"What I'm wondering is whether the PC gurus here might know a better way of doing all this."
Erh, well, if tinkering with PC hardware was an AD&D game, swapping motherboards around without first telling the OSses of your crazy plans would be like rolling ten d20s during a battle where the outcome "live" was ten 1s and the outcome "die" every other combination. And but so therefore you should not. Ever.
You should, however, download SP4. Then you should install it. Then you should copy the contents of your Win2K CD to your nice big almost-160GB HD and merge said SP files with them to slipstream and burn a new up-to-date Win2K CD. And then you should reinstall from said new CD onto a fresh NTFS partition. And then you will be free of pain.
Posted by Saltah'na (Member # 33) on :
The way Hard Drive manufacturers make their drives is that they do not make a pure 160 GB drive. Rather, they fill the drive with 160,000,000,000 bytes. If you divide this number by 1024 three times, then you will get a total of 149.012 GB on your hard disk.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Huh. I changed my motherboard and CPU a few months back while running Win2k Pro, and I didn't have a problem.
Well, except that it was defective and I had to get a replacement. But the replacement worked fine.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
I can back that up, I swapped motherboards a few times with W2K as well, although I think we needed to boot with the install CD and use the repair function. This was with pretty similar AMD Athlon/Asus motherboards which probably helps.
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
Yeah these were ECS mobos. I hadn't had too much trouble doing this in the past. But those were Win98SE installs. Incidentally, I'm writing this from the very PC I was having so much trouble with. Everything seems to be working. I took Cartman's advice. Making a Win2KSP4 (with the "slipstream" and the bootable) install disk was not as easy as he made it sound. There was also a bit of scary when the WIN2K setup referred to my disk as the 137,030MB Drive, but it seemed to work OK and is presently reporting around 149GB.
I figured the drive-size thing would be something like that. Stupid bytes. I appreciate your explanations. I also feel better after having changed my fresh install's desktop theme to something more blue and shifting to Firefox. This thing is certainly a lot more peppy than it was with the old install. I'm about to copy some of my apps over, but there are a couple that look dodgy and unfamiliar.
Thank you again for your assistance. For future reference, how would you/did you go about installing the drivers for your new mobo before installing it? I guess I'm just not sure how that would work. I got some cash back for some traffic BS. An Athlon 64 system is in my future. I want to be ready.
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
For those attempting to do something similar, this link proved invaluable.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Switching the motherboard depends largely on how similar the old and new motherboards are. When you change graphics cards, Windows (should) think "ooh, that thing looks different. What is it? Ahhh, it's a graphics card. I'll just update that". It's the equivalent of buying a new sofa.
Changing motherboards, however, is the equivalent of applying new wallpaper,carpets, furniture, and changing the size and location of every room. And putting the staircase outside. Sometimes Windows is able to cope, but othertimes so much stuff has changed that Windows simply says "where the hell is everything? I'm confused and lost. Fuck it, I'm going to blue screen and show them all."
Does Win2K (no SP) really only recognise drives of 120gb? I thought that NTFS could support volume sizes up to 17 terrabytes (and theoretically up to 256 terrabytes), or something ridiculous like that?
Posted by Vice-Admiral Michael T. Colorge (Member # 144) on :
I wouldn't know, I ended up helping my friend build a new computer to run Windows XP Pro... after we ended up returning components because the mobo wasn't compatible with the CPU and no one bothered to figure out that memory modules aren't the same as memory sticks from Sony.
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
quote:Originally posted by PsyLiam: Does Win2K (no SP) really only recognise drives of 120gb? I thought that NTFS could support volume sizes up to 17 terrabytes (and theoretically up to 256 terrabytes), or something ridiculous like that?
The format very well may, but the default IDE (ATAPI?) mainboard drivers, er, don't. For some reason. Which I clearly don't understand. Or something. G5s are very shiny.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Not to get into the old Mac/PC debate, but the comparison here is essentially unfair. You're comparing a system where all the components are selected and known about in advance to another system that is expected to be compatible with every piece of hardware under the sun. you can't be too harsh on Windows if it doesn't cope 100% with you ripping out the motherboard, as it is a fairly huge thing.
That said, what motherboard are you using? And are you using the latest drivers (hnng) for it? (If you're not sure, download SANDRA and see if that identifies it.)
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
I am totally using the proper drivers now. It's just that the non-SP Win2K Pro installer disk's default IDE drivers weren't recognizing that my drive was larger than 120GB.
Oh, and I wasn't drawing any comparisons or anything. I was merely attempting to explain my complete boobery regarding motherboard swaps and NTFS and large capacity disks and other such. Whereas I do know that G5s have shiny, shiny metal cases, I had no idea I'd be spending four or five days getting my PCs back in working condition. But I'm learning. F'rinstance, I'd never heard of SANDRA until just now. I'm still not sure what it does as the FAQ does not contain that question.
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Okay, since nobody asked.
In the beginning, there was (parallel) ATA. And it was good. Then came ATAPI, and it was better. And then nothing happened. IDE (which sounds cooler than ATA, but, erh, isn't) drives came and went, PIO* got ousted in favor of DMA, which got ousted in favor of UDMA*, storage capacity jumped from 504MiB to 8GiB to 32GiB to 137GiB, but, throughout it all, programmers remained as stupid^Z short-sighted as ever. Particularly regarding DMA controller implementations and OS disk IO layers. I mean, 640K was never fucking enough for everybody either, and it was only thanks to a handful of brave daring souls that Y2K didn't destroy the world, but did they learn anything? No. The problem was this: accessing data blocks on harddrives in IBM-compatible PC's had always been done with Method One (CHS), which was limited to only 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors, which was due to a combination of IBM's BIOS interface (which allowed 1024 cylinders, 256 heads, and 63 sectors) and the AT's disk controller (which allowed 65536 cylinders, 16 heads, and 256 sectors, so it had an addressing limit of 2^28 bits), which, all in all, meant that a drive with 512-byte sectors could not be larger than 528MB, or 504MiB, which at the time CHS was conceived seemed bigger than Tim (though, of course, he was fatter), and but so therefore when those 528MB turned out to be less spacious then originally thought, there was a loud gnashing of teeth. And panic. And then there was Method Two (LBA). And it was nice. It was nice because now block addresses could be 28 or 48 bits wide, enabling 128GiB and 128PiB (!) drives at 512 bytes per drive-sector. Fast-forward to somewhere in late 1999. Microsoft has conjured up a fancy new file system (well, a new version of an older, not-so-fancy-but-fancier-than-FAT system) to go with its fancy new, soon-to-be-unleashed OS, but has not added support for 48-bit LBA as outlined by the ATA/ATAPI 6.0 standard. It releases Win2K without fixing this. It also keeps this quiet for over a year. Then it publishes a Knowledge Base article about said lack of support. Nobody reads said article. Administrators suffer and type out lengthy tales on message boards to combat pain. Said pain doesn't go away. End of part one.
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
This may be a sign that I'm losing my marbles, but I find this all sort of fascinating, this compressed history. And so I wonder: will there be a part 2?
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
SANRDA is just a diagnosing tool. It sits in your control panel and tells you lots of useful information about your drives, motherboard, bios, ports, and stuff with bits on it. It's free.
It can't always identify everything (especially obscure hardware), but it can come in handy. Download it from, er, download.com.
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
"...will there be a part 2?"
Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future... B)
(Maybe.)
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
It wouldn't do to leave all those questions unanswered. (I read some spoilers for Ep 2, and I heard they talk about SATA. Edge of my seat.)
In other less interesting news, I tried installing Win2K on a new 200GB drive (no mobo swapping) knowing full well that my SP4 enhanced Win2K install disk (over which I'd toiled so hard with the slipstreaming and the following error-riddled instructions) would totally recognize this big old drive and I wouldn't have to resort to any Win98 weirdness to have it work. Except that it didn't and I wound up having to fdisk it up to it's full capacity, format /s it and then run the Win2K SP4 disk and have it nuke that old partition and re-format. Over the course of several days I was able to do this (work and moviemaking in-between). It does seem strange that a Win98SE utility does recognize large disks where Win2K (which some complex math reveals was released 2 years after) does not.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I know it's not overly helpful, but isn't there a totally legal copy of XP you could get hold of?
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Erh, yes, well, that would be because Win2K's so aptly named FastFAT driver is very serious about abiding by the restrictions of (Win98) FAT32, which, while very accomodating in the cluster department (so accomodating, in fact, that a logical volume can house up to 2^28 (not 2^32, because, for some reason known only to Microsoft, the last four bits aren't actually used) of them, which, at 32KB per cluster, yields a theoretical volume size of 8 terabytes ("theoretical" because the MBR partition table and FAT32 boot sector are littered with 32-bit fields that limit said size to only 2 terabytes (at 512 bytes per sector, of course), and because there is some weird backward compatibility deal re: ScanDisk (which is a 16-bit program, and since all 16-bit programs have a maximum memory block allocation size of 16MB (minus some housekeeping bytes) and a FAT entry on a FAT32 volume takes up 4 bytes, it cannot process FAT32 FATs with more than 4177920 32KB clusters) in place that further limits said size to around 128GB (except in WinME, where it is back to 2 terabytes))), is not so friendly when it comes to partitions (being just a lowly file system as opposed to a guts-'n'-glory addressing scheme), at least not in Win2K, which, for another reason known only to Microsoft, will not let you format FAT32 partitions in excess of 32GB even if you sell your soul to Bill (though it will recognize any such pre-existing partition correctly), and but so therefore (2) Win98 fdisk (which is a 32-bit partition table manipulator, and partition tables reside in a disk's MBR, and MBRs are independent of any file system snags) will happily whip your blank 200GB disk into shape, whereas the FastFAT-aided Win2K (SP4 or no SP4) install routine, if pointed toward the same blank 200GB drive, will not think to check, or check to think, beyond the 128GB FAT32 volume limit.
You should format to NTFS.
(This was not part two. Also I feel guilty about stealing your marbles.)
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Holy shit: that's nothing but gibberish! Back on the Ritalin for you, young man!
Posted by WizArtist II (Member # 1425) on :
Remind me not to ever ask for directions!
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
*head explodes*
Well of course that's why. I don't know why I didn't think of that. Explain to me again why Mac users are daft. Ok, no wait. Don't.
quote:Originally posted by Psyliam: I know it's not overly helpful, but isn't there a totally legal copy of XP you could get hold of?
But think of all the fun I'd miss out on. Also it was a certain very knowledgeable someone here who I believe told me that Win2k was just like WinXP without all the kiddy shit.
quote:Originally posted by Cartman: You should format to NTFS.
I think I did. I mean I wanted to. Would it be goofy on account of the original fdisk partioning?
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
quote:Originally posted by Balaam Xumucane: Also it was a certain very knowledgeable someone here who I believe told me that Win2k was just like WinXP without all the kiddy shit.
That was the original belief. But XP is actually far more different than people originally thought. The driver support is better, if nothing else. And other things. I haven't got my big anti-2000 rant to hand that isn't just taken from PC Format's helpdesk in any way, so I can't be more specific. Plus, I really should be working.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Fortunatly I can just copy it from the web-site . Woo! Note: The following opinion is not mine, but it is the opinion of someone who looks a bit scary, so I'd listen to him ahead of, say, Foolish Jason or Crazy-Man Tim.
quote:Windows 2000 isn�t just a different version of Windows; it�s a completely separate branch of the evolutionary tree. It�s the Neanderthal man of operating systems � upright gait, simple tool use, primitive language, but nonetheless destined for the archaeological midden heap. The only reason Windows 2000 is more stable is that it refuses to run a lot of software. ... Microsoft has repositioned Win2K as a secure and stable operating system for the corporate environment but this is just marketing fluff designed to protect thousands of pre-existing volume licensing deals.
That was irrelevent, wasn't it? Unless your next question is about running "A Bug's Life", in which case you should follow the link.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
A bit of an exaggeration as well, methinks. I'm currently using W2K and I can run everything that I want to, well excluding Linux programs (duh). The main issue is that yes, you will not be able to run many games that were designed strictly for W95/ME but seriously, what is anymore? (and considering that A Bug's Life was released in what, 1999?)
However, methinks that anyone tooling around with a 200GB hard drive, a 9800, and a Sempron should be more interested in playing say Rome: Total War, KOTOR2, or Half Life 2 than say 6 year old games.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
You also can't use that X-Box sing-along-like-an-idiot-thing with W2K. Much sadness there.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
?
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I don't know. The Karaoke thing.
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
PaRappa the rapper? Because I think that's Sony. I do appreciate the article you linked, Liam, but he doesn't really back his claims up with anything. And Win2K has proven pretty stable for my uses (albeit not gaming uses) (Also I didn't find a picture of him so I remain unintimidated, unpersuaded) Which isn't to say that I'm not XP curious. Because now that I think of it, I do kind of like that kiddie shit.
Not that anyone cares, but my gaming PC actually runs Win98SE because I like old games for I am olden. It's just my work PC (Office, Lightwave and 3DShit) and now Moviola PC (Azureus and WiMP) that are running 2K. After much hassle. But stable.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
No. Something else. I don't care.
It wasn't really an article. That bloke writes the helpdesk pages in PC Format, and most of his answers involve him being unecessarily rude and/or sarcastic to those writing in. They don't really have enough space to do a complete breakdown.
And if you like playing old games, and your old PC plays them, then by all means use it.
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
Ooof. More problems. Hooray! At a party no less, how embarrassing. The Win2K Moviola machine locked up and then after clcking through an endless loop of error messages, I reset it. And it didn't reset. So today's unhelpful, unintuitive error message is "Error loading operating system".
CMOS sees it. S.M.A.R.T. says the volume appears to be OK. Booting from my extrafancy Win2KSP4 disc and attempting to even locate the Win2K install to repair was unsuccessful. So I've chosen the Console option. Do I want to FIXBOOT? Or possibly FIXMBA? I'm uncertain. (Do I want to fire the thing out of a cannon at a certain software magnate's house in Seattle? Oh, I'm quite certain.)
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I'm not sure, but isn't SMART useless for that sort of thing? I always thought it was more a long term error checking mechanism that allowed you to see when the drive was starting to degrade, rather than something to diagnose existing faults with?
I don't think you want either Fixboot or Fixmba. I'd go for Chkdsk. Possible with a /p or /r next to it. I forget. Whichever one forces it to do a thorough repair. Make some tea.