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Tales from the Geekside | ||||||
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author: outCat The Curse of the Hidden Hard Drive I once discovered somewhat messily that old 5-1/4" disk drives can get very dirty. But I thought I was an übergeek when I ordered all my new system upgrades. I cackled with glee when I saw my shimmering, gorgeous, easy-to-open ATX mid-tower, my shiny, golden motherboard, my K6-2/400 in its little bubble package, the intricate, city-like designs on the back of that 168-pin 64 MB DIMM . . . and my Western Digital 8.4 Caviar. With glee a friend of mine and I attacked the gritty task of setting jumpers, mounting drives, sticking little pins into their little sockets, and generally putting together the perfect machine. We labored industriously for several hours, putting up with his younger brother, obscure motherboard documentation, and lost screws, but we came through. I didn't have a video card to spare at the time, however, so I couldn't try to boot my baby just then. A week or so later my brother "discovered" a functional Compaq 386 in his room (Geekiness runs in the family, I guess). He gave me the Diamond VGA card and I happily placed it in the now-complete system. Everything went swimmingly. The fan spun up, it went through POST, it made its delightful little beep . . . It didn't auto-detect the hard drive. Scratching my head, I checked that I had the cable in the right way and that the jumper setting was correct. It was. I slapped my forehead with disgust at my own idiocy when I spotted the EZBios boot/partition aid that came on a floppy with the drive, and rebooted from said floppy. EZBios worked happily away and informed me in a cheerful, 16-color sort of way that it had detected my shining disk, that it had partitioned it into four neat slices, and that if I restarted, everything would hum away happily. With a look of stupid ecstasy on my face, I rebooted. Still no hard drive. "No pressure, no pressure," I murmured, and decided to manually enter the HDD settings in the CMOS setup. No dice. By this time I was wondering if perhaps the CMOS battery had shipped bad. So I shut down my system for the night and tromped to Radio Shack the next morning. The sales rep tested it and told me it was fine. After picking my jaw up off the floor and driving home, I replaced the CMOS battery in my system and sat down on top of the case. I suppose all geeks get emotional about their systems, and I, a 17-year-old girl, am no exception. I stared bleakly, blankly ahead at the crippled Compaq 386, wondering what on earth I'd gotten myself into, pitying myself, pitying my poor 'puter . . . "The Compaq has a hard drive," I said to no one in particular. Duh. I set to work, attempting to worm my skinny geek-fingers through the proprietary, awkward structure of the ancient system, and eventually produced a 5-1/4" 64-MB IDE hard drive. I had nowhere to mount the gargantuan thing in my case, so I set it on a foam pad on top of the case. I set it as master (at least I think I did--Compaq isn't big on making jumpers idiot-friendly) and booted. The LED lit up. The drive autodetected, spun up, expressed its dire confusion at the DOS 6.22 boot floppy in the drive (the HDD had DOS 4.0 on it), but acted happy. Needless to say, so did I. EPILOGUE However, I'm seriously considering staying away from disk drives from now on.
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