...and this moron calls ME an idiot.

About six or seven weeks ago I got myself some nice upgrades for my computer: an 80 gig Western Digital hard drive with an 8mb cache and a 40x TDK burner. I got them NEW off of googlegear. With a little bit of tinkering, I got the burner to work, and reluctantly took my friend’s advice to install windows xp (I like 98 better) in order to get the rather stubborn hard drive to work. To do that, I had to switch it to the master channel and make my old one the slave. This wasn’t my optimum setup, and against my friend’s advice, I vowed to “gut” my storage devices after getting a spool of CD-RWs and backing everything up with my new burner.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. Two weeks later the hard drive, as I tried to click on an AIM chat window, began to make a rhythmic clicking noise much like a late 80’s car’s blinker does in the cabin when engaged. With the help of another friend who is much more knowledgeable, we diagnosed the problem as defective headers. In the meantime I’m using an old laptop my parents brought me from home when the school year started.

Within a matter of days after the catastrophe, I’d gotten back into direct contact with my online friends, whom I had informed of my predicament in the meantime.

One of them told me that the “village idiot” of the message board where we frequent had called me an idiot for what had happened. This buffoon of which I speak has a penchant for treating trivial knowledge about something for expertise and outright lying about stuff such as release dates for models and the like. He also fancies himself a real “pimp.”

A few days ago he left his self-imposed exile from the all-but-dead message board to respond to the thread I made about my hard drive failure. This is what he said:

Brill-fucking-iant, Sherlock.

The funny thing is that I couldn’t use the computer without an OS on the master drive. He seems to think that’s possible. Neophyte though I may be, it seems to me that such is NEVER possible. Am I wrong?

Worse still, word around the campfire is that he’s of the opinion that this perceived ill-advised course of action on my part caused the hard drive failure, thus leading him to call me an idiot for MY lack of knowledge.

I could forgive someone who admittedly knew little about computers and ventured such “advice” based on their impressions. But this fellow fancies himself to be a prodigy of sorts, and simply ducks away when someone calls him out on his lies/inaccuracies.

I love it when people assume the worst about someone else’s intelligence in order to justify their self-styled image of skill at, well, anything. Especially this guy.

Stupid lump of herpes-addled twat-yeast.

I tell bad stories:

-The whole burner-hd package was all new, but cheap. I’m not sure if I did well to order from googlegear, as they weren’t listed as one of the prime sites for purchasing hardware.

-My friend’s reason for admonishing me not to install windows 98 after my second is that he believes that I’d be “clinging to the past” if I didn’t install XP.

-the spool of CDs still hasn’t arrived. In fact, I know that the UPS place sent them back to the dealer because I didn’t pick them up in time. I unfortunately found the notice in my mailbox the day after the deadline.

I think you may be. It may depend on your bios - I’ve had several systems in which the hard disk with the OS is the slave, or the CD is the master and the hard disk is a slave. It’s not for any good reason, it all depends on which drives jumpers are harder to reach. I can’t recall having any serious problems.

Ummm…yeah. The slave drive has the OS and that causes problems with the drive heads how exactly? This is the kind of thing where I’d ask for an explanation. The old ‘That’s extremely interesting, can you please explain how that’s possible?’ routine. (Or, in short, ‘Cite?’ :slight_smile: )
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Call him out. Ask for cites, with papers, technical detail on how the location of the OS can cause hardware problems. Put up or shut up time, right? Happy hunting :slight_smile:

I’ve had no problems ordering h/w from googlegear. I recently built two computers with 90% of the parts ordered from googlegear. Good prices, low cost 2nd-day shipping, helpful support. Only knock is restocking fees.

Oh, I did, but having seen this guy operate for almost two years now it’s safe to say that he won’t respond. He’s not the virulent type of troller in that he tries to provoke, he’s just an attention whore, as he’s been called in the past.

512 Megs of PC800 RDRAM, delivered as ordered. They had a bit of up and down ratings on www.resellerratings.com but had taken the time to respond to each complaint, which is a good sign.

www.newegg.com is the gold standard still, but they were out of the Samsung RDRAM I wanted at the time.

:slight_smile:

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I think you may be. It may depend on your bios - I’ve had several systems in which the hard disk with the OS is the slave, or the CD is the master and the hard disk is a slave. It’s not for any good reason, it all depends on which drives jumpers are harder to reach.
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The master just needs to be bootable, the OS can be pretty much anywhere. I’ve heard of people putting OSs on CDs to make their PCs multi-system capable.

Sounds like you found another handy.

Damn, I knew I should have previewed first!

Come to think of it, in most cases the master doesn’t even need to be bootable. The BIOS should be able to set to look for a bootable disk in a certain location (IDE0, IDE1, floppy, CD-ROM).

Most modern MBs + OS combos will let you have the OS on a non master channel drive but there may be a short delay while the system looks for the OS on the drive chain.

XP really is the way to go for a system with sufficient horsepower. I have a 120 gig and 100 gig drive on a Win 98SE OS based system at home, but I had to get the latest MB BIOS update and a MS Win 98SE OS patch to fdisk and format the drives properly since Win98se as installed doesn’t pay nice with drives past 60 gigs. XP is much less of a hassle in working with large 60+ gig drives. I use XP on my office PC and it’s much more bulletproof and stable. It’s a vastly better OS technically.

Your best bet at this point might be to install the 80 gig drive as a stand alone drive (master and stand alone jumpering may be different) and install XP on it in this mode. When offered partition options choose FAT32 not NTFS to maximize compatibility with the existing drive you will add as slave after XP is installed. Possibly NTFS and FAT32 partitions can co-exist peacefully in the same box under XP but I have not tried this. Re-jumper to master/slave and add the second drive with the saved data as a slave.