posted
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.
Registered: Sep 2000
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
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.
Registered: Nov 1999
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Saltah'na
Chinese Canadian, or 75% Commie Bastard.
Member # 33
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.
-------------------- "And slowly, you come to realize, it's all as it should be, you can only do so much. If you're game enough, you could place your trust in me. For the love of life, there's a tradeoff, we could lose it all but we'll go down fighting...." - David Sylvian FreeSpace 2, the greatest space sim of all time, now remastered!
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
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.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
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.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
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?
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
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.
-------------------- "It speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow, it's not all going to be over with a big splash and a bomb, that the human race is improving, that we have things to be proud of as humans." -Gene Roddenberry about Star Trek
Registered: May 1999
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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.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
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.)
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
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.
Registered: Sep 2000
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
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.
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
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?
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
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.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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