Troubleshooting & the Passage of Time
Ugh.
I went to Fry’s yesterday & picked up an extra gig of RAM for my desktop, plus a larger external drive for storage. Prior to yesterday, I only had a half-gig, making it hard to run XP, play World of Warcraft, and have Firefox open, all at the same time. It wasn’t a bad deal — about $90 for the gig & about $90 for 300 gig of storage. I also had a new DVD-RW drive that I bought some time ago but never installed.
So I set about installing everything yesterday afternoon. I decided to use the existing 2nd hard drive as a backup of files. I had to jump through some hops, but basically spent the day:
- Installing new one-gig DIMM (by itself first)
- Removing Grub, the Linux boat loader, so I could replace the existing 2nd hard drive
- Discounted old DVD drive
- Inserted new (now third) hard drive
- Copied everything on old 2nd drive to the new drive
- Deleted stuff I didn’t need backed up off 2nd drive
- Copied stuff I wanted backed up on primary drive to 2nd drive
- Moved stuff not needed on primary drive to new 3rd drive (to free up space on primary)
- Disconnect, label & store away old 2nd drive
- Move third drive into old spot of 2nd drive
- Insert new DVD-RW drive
- Install old half-gif DIMM to see if it works with one-gig
I left out a few optional steps I pursued, such as misconfiguring the jumpers, attaching the wrong cables to the wrong drive, finding my XP cd, figuring out how to get in emergency mode. I rebooted between each step, as I learned long ago, troubleshooting is a lot easier if you minimize the number of things that have changed from a working instance to a broken one.
The long part was the copying around of files, but that wasn’t so bad as I started the longest jobs & then went over to Khayman & Laurel’s for dinner. I got back around midnight, and thought I’d be able to finish up in a half hour. The problem with troubleshooting, however, is your sense of time goes out the window. When I was finally done tweaking & troubleshooting, I was happy it all worked. For about 2 seconds. It took about 2 seconds to confirm the machine registered all 1.5 gig of ram & could see all the drives, before my eyes drifted down & to the clock.
4:30 am.
Ouch.
