Since I’ve been working at home from time to time this fall I needed to install a bunch of software on my machine, and the inevitable finally happened: I ran out of hard drive space. Rather than deal with perpetual offloading stuff to another drive I decided to get a new bigger hard drive and swap the old one out. Since my old computer died I’m down to one computer, which went from being my music studio computer to my everything computer. So I also decided I’m gonna get a new machine for the studio sometime this winter. And it’s gonna be a Mac, my first new one in over 10 years. I was a long time Mac user, practically from the beginning in the 80’s, until Paul Allen personally forced me to switch to Windows when I worked for Interval Research Corporation, his secretive Silicon Valley think thank. But Vista looks like a total dog that jumped the shark, and PC hardware design reminds me more of Soviet-era cars with each year. Meanwhile the Macs keep getting better and better. Not only are they sleek and shiny and integrated and all, but they include Linux and you can run Windows on ’em still. Best of all worlds.
But that’s a few months away. I needed to upgrade the hard drive to my PC now. Never having done this before I did a bit of research and determined Norton Ghost looked like a good way to go. However, since my machine is a laptop and Ghost is designed to run with a workstation, the directions provided didn’t fully work, and the project turned into a bit of an adventure.
Luckily, I have an old, old PC that runs Win2K lying around, and also luckily Jeannie wanted to help me with this project. So we thought we’d do an upgrade on that machine first as a test. We have an old external hard drive case for laptops with a PCMCIA adaptor, and Jeanie has a box full of old hard drives she salvaged from somewhere. So we off we went. The process was complicated by the fact that the old HD was on its last legs, and in fact died while we were backing it up. We got the C drive (which was the boot drive) but the D partition was a mess, and it took a bit of time to determine what had happened. The only way to go was forward. We swapped the drives but the machine wouldn’t boot. Instead an alert came up advising us there was a problem with the pageSys file. Over and over in a loop. Norton says to set some jumpers on the new drive in this situation, but that advice is for 2 internal drives on the same bus in a workstation, so it looked like we were out of luck.
The internet to the rescue. It turns out all you need to do is reset the master boot record. (Bet you already knew that!) To do that you need to boot in DOS mode and run the magic command:
fdisk /mbr
and all is right again. The computer doesn’t have a floppy drive, but we were able to put the original Windows Recovery CD in, boot off of that, exit the utility app and we found ourselves in DOS.
On to the main act. We put the new 160 GB into the sled and ran Norton. We tried to boot of the system disk from the old machine, but the new machine wouldn’t let us, because the new machine runs XP. We found a DOS boot disk image on the internet and burned it to a CD. Thanks, Internet! Then we did the hardware swap, which on this particular machine meant taking quite a bit of it apart. Put it all back together with the new drive and booted, and…
Nothing. Hung mid-boot. Not even an alert. Now we were glad we did the experiment in win2K, cuz it was the same problem with the pageSys. So we put in the CD and spun up in DOS and said fdisk /mbr then it came around.
I ran some apps and everything looked cool. After some poking around, a couple of little things seemed off. I ran proTools and for some reason SampleTank was running in trial mode, and I had to go to their web site and get a new authorization code, which is bogus it’s running on the same machine. And I’m gonna need a new code when install it on the Mac.
It reminds me of that movie where the doctor says “technically the procedure is brain damage, but its no worse that say a night of heavy drinking.”