eAction

I’ve had another personal experience from which to draw some good advice.

At our Canadian Thanksgiving my brother announced that he had bought himself a new computer because the old one had died. It would only go as far as BIOS and that seemed to indicate he had no hard drive any more.

Well, I’d been thinking of replacing a hard drive in my own computer but since I’d never done it before I was a little hesitant. Suddenly I had an idea. If Tom’s computer was now garbage I could take it home, find some cheap, second hand hard drive and try installing on that computer first, before I bungled up mine. If it didn’t work out I would not have lost anything but some time.

I took his old box and keyboard home and eventually had time to fire it up and see. Sure enough, BIOS didn’t seem to know it had a hard drive any more. It must be toast.

Another day, walking home from downtown I stopped in at a computer store I had not been to for years. They seemed to have used ones to sell. I was able to get a used 8 GB hard drive for $25. A little steep if hard drives are suppose to be less than a $1 per GB these days, but I decided to take it.

When I got to opening up Tom’s computer I discovered that the cable plug had fallen out of the old hard drive. Hmmm! That might explain a lot. I plugged it in, and found room just above it to slide in this one I had just bought right above the old one. I got them both plugged in and turned the computer on to see what it would do.

Well! Now it complained that the Master drive had failed, but in BIOS it appeared to know it had two drives.

I went back online in my own computer to research this, and was pretty sure it had to do with Master-Slave settings. It took another day or two to find the right diagrams for those little tiny caps you put over two pins. I learned that yes, when you have two drives, they can’t both be master. One has to have first rights to kick in, and the other takes second fiddle.

The first couple of setting configurations I tried still gave me that “master drive has failed” message. Then I learned online that if I set both of the drives to “Cable Select” then the hard drive plugged in at the end of the ribbon cable would be the Master. That would work, I decided. The newer 8 GB drive would be at the end, so if the other drive wasn’t working right, I could still check it, but not need to count on it. (Tom had hoped to get some email addresses off the old drive).

I decided to try installing a Linux Distro, so I could partition and format the drives. It seemed concerned about mounting a Win96 drive, which threw me off a bit, until I remembered that the used drive I had bought had come out of an old Windows computer. In the partitioning stage I was able to change the setting so it would be formatted as a Linux drive. Presto! Then things began to roll forward!

Unfortunately I had my back turned, facing my own computer when the first CD was done, and didn’t get the second on in on time, so the installation was interrupted. I needed to get on with some other work, so I’ve left it. But now the extra Distros I had ordered from ShipLinux have arrived, and I’m hoping to try installing Ubunto over lunch today on Tom’s old computer.

If I can salvage those email addresses for Tom he’ll be a happy camper, and I’ll have a spare computer for an internship plan I have in mind for the new year! That makes two happy campers here!

Moral for you: old computers can be salvaged and yes, you can install a hard drive yourself!