Has there been some decision that I am simply not capable of handling more than four gigabytes of hard drive space? I’m starting to think that all this talk about “10 gigs” and “20 gigs” and “30 gigs” is some elaborate joke to see how gullible I am. Recently the existence of a 60 gig hard drive has been claimed.
Okay, so I fell for it. I went down to the computer store, got one of those brightly colored boxes with the picture of platters and a head (apparently the hard drive isn’t dramatic enough when it’s in its case), paid for it with a check (which appently involved a thorough examination of my credit history before being finally accepted), and drove home, excited to finally have a hard drive where I didn’t have to worry about how much space I had left. Oh, the thoughts that flew through my head. Why, I could rip my entire CD collection onto my hard drive, and never have to get up to change a CD again! I could move all those games that I have to run off of the CD drive directly onto my computer!
So, I get home, and put the hard drive in. I put in the initialization diskette. It doesn’t work. I try booting from the disk drive. It tells me that I have to boot directly into DOS mode. So I boot into DOS mode. It tells me that it’s only for Western Digital Hard Drives, and that I don’t have a Western Digital Hard Drive. Huh. So what was that hand-sized object I just put into the hard drive bay, plugged the power cord into, and connected to my motherboard?
By this time it’s getting late, and I know that Customer Service won’t be open. So I wait until the next day. I call Customer Service. After being told that I’m trying to add an IDE drive to a system that already has a SCSI drive, the Customer Servive guy tells me that if I have both a SCSI drive and an IDE drive, it won’t work because the system will boot to the IDE drive, which is empty. I tell him that the SCSI drive is currently working just fine, and that that’s what it booted to. He tells me yet again, this time in a more patronizing tone, that it will boot to the IDE drive. I tell him that it booted to the SCSI drive. He gets annoyed at me, tells me that I’m not listening to him, and explained yet again that it will boot to the IDE drive. He recommends unplugging the SCSI drive so that it won’t have the SCSI/IDE conflict. This seems really silly to me (if the problem is that it won’t boot to the SCSI drive, how is removing the SCSI drive going to fix the problem?), but I figure that even idiots are right sometimes, and I’m clearly not going to be able to have a rational conversation with this guy, and a wild shot is better than nothing.
So I shut down and unplug the computer (I’m not sure what would happen if I screwed around with the cables while the computer is turned on, and I try to keep my experimentation to things that cost less than however many thousands of dollars my computer cost (not worth, mind you. cost). Then I unplud the SCSI hard drive, boot up and: no difference. Except now I don’t have any hard drive. So I call CS up again. I get someone else. She thinks it might be my jumper settings. So I remove my jumper, reboot. Doesn’t work. I call again. They’re closed. Apperently the “Western” part of their names refers only to where they sell their hard drives, and not to where they have their CS centers; it was two in my time zone when they closed.
The next day is Saturday, and they close even earlier on Saturday, so I didn’t manage to call them. Sunday they’re not open at all. Monday I call again. This guy actually seems to know something. He has me change some BIOS settings, and manages to make the original error message go away. Now I get another error message instead. He tells me that my system is too old, and it can’t handle both types of drives, and I should either: completely remove the SCSI drive from my system (get rid of a drive I know works for one that might work? Yeah, right!) or buy an newer controller (a proverb about throwing good money after bad comes to mind).
So I drive back to the store for a refund. I had forgotten the manuals, and a jumper and a screw had gotten lost. I buy some new jumpers (they don’t sell just one, so I have to pay nearly seven bucks for a bunch of them). I go to a hardware store to see if they happen to have any screws of the appropiate size. No such luck. So I go home, and after some scrounging around I managed to find the final screw. So after several hours of dealing with the hard drive, I gather all the stuff together to finally get rid of it. I drive to the store, where I am informed that I’m missing a cable. I leave in a very irritated mood. After taking care of a bunch of other stuff, I got around to making another try. I get there, and there is a huge line for returns. I wait for over half an hour, get a receipt, which I get to stand in line again to give to a cashier. I’m then told that the check will arrive in about ten days.
So I go home. I put my computer back together, untangle all the wires, sit my tower back upright. There are some strange error messages when I boot up now, but everything seems to work correctly, so I just ignore them. The next day, a CD that I’d ordered arrived. I was rather excited, and I quickly unwrap it and stick in in the CD drive (no, I don’t own a separate CD player). That’s when I realized that my IDE controller, which handles both my Zip drive and my CD-ROM, had stopped working during all that fiddling around I had been doing trying to get the new hard drive to work. So I opened the computer again, checked to make sure that the cables hadn’t been knocked loose.
Then I went to my BIOS and undid all the changes I had done. Nope. I called up Western Digital to see if they could undo whatever they had done. Nope. I called up Intel (which makes the controller). I got an answering machine. After all the trouble I went through, I get the impression that I’m simply not meant to have a bigger hard drive. Apparantly losing a CD-ROM and Zip drive is punishment for my hubris. I guess asking for a hard drive that will work with a computer two whole years old is just asking too much from the industry. I guess when Western Digital claimed that their drive is “guaranteed compatible”, they mean “guaranteed to be compatible with any computer that’s new enough that you don’t need another hard drive anyway”. I mean, just what is their target market? People that just bought a computer with a ten gig hard drive and think “That’s not nearly enough!”? Do they really think that asking people to buy a new computer every year is good marketing stategy?
Anyway, if anyone can tell me how to how to re-enable a controller, I’d be grateful.
