Well, I *Finally* got my hard drives to work for me. I started on them last Tuesday and I just finished yesterday. It wasn't exactly as easy as I hoped it was going to be, but it's done and I'm happy! Here's a list of what I did on my computers. I'll go into more detail then I think anyone will care to read, but if you do manage to get through the whole thing, congratulations! I'm also pretty sure that there will be some stuff in there that might go into Computer Stupidities later, but oh well.

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Tuesday the 11th:

The computer came at 9:00 in the morning and left immediately thereafter. The postal guy left a note on the door. There was an option to get the computer left on the doorstep at 9:00 the following morning, and hope no one stole it before I came home from school at about 5:30. It was snowing wet snow. Needless to say, I didn't like that idea, so I went and picked it up at the Purolator depot at around 6:00 that night. I turned on the computer. And it worked. For the first and last time in the next few days.

I was suprised by the sheer volume of junk that Dell put on the computer. It wasn't as bad as Packard Bell, but it was still enough to be quite annoying. I didn't really care though, as I was planning on reformatting it anyway. I decided to start working on it that night.

Now, to open the case was its own little adventure. It didn't open like any other computer I had before. It has a little thumbscrew and 2 little thingmies on the left and the right (When laying the computer on its side). I tried for about 10 minutes to open the thing, first unscrewing the thumbscrew and then puching down on the 2 little thingmies. I tried pushing and pulling, but it didn't work. Eventually, I gave up and went to the manual. I had the right idea, but the wrong direction. I also had to push back on the part of the computer below the 2 little thingmies as well as pull the coover towards me. Once I got that off, I found that there was a restraining bar that I had to get rid of before I could access the hard drive. Right.

The restraining bar was easier then thought. I just kinda pulled and it came out. The amusing part about the bar is that on the BOTTOM of it, it says "Do not use as a hande". It's rather impossible to see that until after it comes off.

Once the cover and restaining rod were out of the way, it was easy enough to get to the hard drive. I just had to remove a few screws in odd places. Of course, I had to get to the hard drive in the Packard Bell too....

The Packard Bell is what I would call a compact comuter. They put in all that they can and try to use as little casing as possible. Once the case was removed, it was easy enough to find the hard drive, but the screws kept the hard drive in were quite annoying to get at. It was only AFTER I had removed 2 screws using a series of screw driver heads and plyers that I noticed one screw that seemed to keep the hard drive case attached to the computer. Upon unscrewing that, the hard drive, complete with it's case, just sort of fell down. That was a bad thing. Luckily, the hard drive wasn't mounted all that high, and no real damage was done.

With both hard drives available, I was ready to connect them. Just then, however, my mom came in and DEMANDED the useage of the computer for Tax purposes that night, ignoring the fact that, at this time, the two computers were in about 20 pieces on the floor. I couldn't do much about this though, so I had to undo everything that I did that day.

Summery for Tuesday: Break computers. Fix computers. Net result = 0 work done.

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Wednesday the 12th:

After school, I tied to do all of this AGAIN. Once getting the computer opened, I connected the old hard drive to the new computer. I had to fiddle around with the jumper settings a bit, but it wasn't really that bad. I just got them both to go for Cable Select. When my computer detected both hard drives were there, I copied the 2GB of important stuff from the old hard drive to the new one.

You can guess what happens just after that. My mom comes in and want to use the computer AGAIN!!! ARGGGG!!!! Well, I put the hard drives back where they were supposed to go and that was all I did that night.

Summery for Wednesday: Dismantle Computers. Put computers back together. Net result in between - 2GB copied.

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Thursday the 13th:

This is when I got most of the stuff done, as I come home eary from school on Thursdays. When I got home, I opened up the computers again and connected the old hard drive to the new computer. After being fairly certain that I had everything that I wanted from the old hard drive (which took a while), I reformated it. Once it was done, I took out the new hard drive and set the old (and empty) hard drive as master. I put in the MS-Windows 98 CD and Disk and installed it. I was suprised that it actually WORKED! The only thing that I had a bit of trouble with was when it wanted me to enter the 26 (or whatever) character code. It took me all of 5 minutes to realize why it wasn't working. I was useing the MS-Word character code instead of the MS-Windows code. Oops. Well, the two booklets look almost identical because of all the "Piracy Proof" stuff they put on it, like heat-sensitive threads that say "Genuine", Microprint, Watermarks, Holographic threads, and a whole bunch of other things that would make it harder to copy then money. Although on the back cover it said that if any of those things were missing, then the booklet might not be legal. Of course, they never said that the book might be illegal if it didn't have the covers.... Well, that's Microsoft for you.

Once Microsoft Windows was installed an it claimed to have installled all of my computer's hardware, I very quickly found out that it didn't. It thought that I had no sound card, no modem, a VIRGE video card (Which is really an insult to my 32MB Diamond Viper video card that I really have) and a whole bunch of other things. The only thing that it dectected properly was the keyboard. It sort of recognized the mouse too, but though it only had 2 buttons instead of 4 buttons and a autoscroll wheel. I eventually got everything working again by using the 'add new hardware' button and the CDs that came with the computer, like the Dell Resource CD, the Soundblaster CD, the 2 Mouse disks, etc. It took a while, but I did manage to get it working at least remotely ok.

Once all of that was installed on the old hard drive, I put the new hard drive in as a slave, transfered the 2GB of stuff back from the new hard drive to the old hard drive and reformated the new hard drive. When I put it in the Packard Bell computer though, I ran into a LOT of trouble.

Apparently, the Parkard Bell couldn't figure out what the new hard drive was supposed to be. It detected it correctly during bootup ("Hard Drive....Installed - Quantum Fireball") but never detected it after that. Even the Windows CD failed to figure out that it was there. I tried every single jumper setting on the hard drive (A formidable task - the jumper for the thing could only be removed with the aid of plyers) but none of the jumper settings worked. After that, I put the jumper back to cable select and put it in the new computer just to make sure that the hard drive worked, and it did. Since I couldn't figure out how to get the 10GB hard drive to interact with the Packard Bell, I went downstairs and grabbed the old 486.

The hard drive in the 486 was the most annoying thing to remove that I had ever come across. The hard drive was attached to the computer with 4 screws. 2 of them were were easy to get at, but to get to the others I had to get THROUGH the mother board. It took a lot of time to get those 2 screws out. I eventually did it with a very short screwdriver and a wrench. I also think that I accidently hit the mother board a few times, so I doubt that it'll ever work again. Oh well, it was only gathering dust anyway.

Once I connected the really old hard drive (which is only 500MB) to the Packard Bell computer, I found out that it DIDN'T HAVE A FORMAT COMMAND! I tried to plug it into the Dell as a slave so I could format it, but the Dell wouldn't detect it because it was too old. Right. I just went to bed after that because it was REALLY late by then. (Like 2:00 am - 3:00 am)

Summary for Thursday: Reformat the Old hard drive, Get Windows and all the hardware to work on it, Reformat the new hard drive, find out it doesn't work on the Packard Bell computer, get the REALLY old hard drive, connect that, find out it doesn't have a format command, fall asleep.

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Friday the 14th

Fail miserably on a test because I almost fell asleep on it. Also at school, I got a format command from a friend. At home, I used it on the really old hard drive and it worked. I installed windows onto it (Trying to use as little space as possible - in the end it took 204 MB out of 389 MB available after formatting). I put my mom's Tax programs onto and then connected the really old hard drive to the Dell computer in order to transfer the tax files to it. Guess what. The Dell still wouldn't detect the really old hard drive no matter how hard I tried. It was rather important that the files got transfered though. Eventually, only one solution seemed possible. Disks. Lots and lots of disks. I transfered 135MB worth of stuff with 1.44MB disks. I got all the disks that I could find in the house, and it was around 35. The largest thing I had to transfer at one time was 55MB, but it was OK once I zipped it. Thank goodness for disk spanning! Every single disk ended up being used more then once. While the Dell zipped up one program on its side, the Packard Bell unzipped the previous program and then put the disks back into circulation. I also had to play with the monitor cord, as I only had one monitor and had to know what I was doing on both computers. It took something along the lines of 3 hours to finish, but once it was done, it actually worked! Of course, the Packard Bell was running incredibly slow due to the amount of fragmentation that all those disks caused. Once I ran Disk Defragmenter though, it ran at a resonable speed (for the Packard Bell, anyway).

Summary for Friday: Friday = Disk Day.

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Saturday the 15th:

Nothing much here. I just made sure everything worked alright. I got a new moniter too, so that my parents could get the old one. Now I've got a 17" Ultra-Flat screen NEC moniter. Yay! I also moved the Packard Bell (as well as all the stuff that came with it) downstairs to the den, where my parents work. I thought that I was done then, but....

...I tried faxing something using my fax/modem in the morning. That worked about as well as a Microsoft product. In fact, the problem was that every other program tried to use Microsoft Fax in order to fax stuff, and Microsoft Fax wasn't installed. Nor could I find it on the Microsoft Windows 98 CD. Nor could I find it on the Microsoft website. I finally, for the FIRST TIME, went to Dell tech support, who listed some obscure directory with a funny name buried in the Windows 98 CD. I ran the program there, and guess what? I got an ERROR MESSAGE! Apparently, Microsoft wants to install an address book before it will even consider giving me Microsoft Fax, and it forgot how to make address books. Or something. Anyway, my computer froze, so I rebooted, tried again, froze the computer again, repeated this a few times, gave it up as a bad job, and am still waiting for another email from tech support. Yip dee doo.

Summary for Saturday: New monitor. Cool. V-H day (Victory over hard drives). D-F day (Defeat over faxing). Microsoft can go eat a bag of Hell. Except for Brunnen-G, who still rules.

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Sunday the 16th:

I wrote a really LONG post.

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-Ka"This post took almost as long to write as the Disk incident!"z!