Christmas Miracle achieved...

[feren]

... (man, I really need a Christmas-themed icon to post with) and lady_curmudgeon's PC is living once more. I owe points a debt of thanks for, well, pointing me in the right direction. On Friday I had surmised that Curmudgeon's computer might just be utterly unable to cope with SATA-2 (a.k.a. SATA 300, I'm lead to understand). Turns out that I was half right. Her computer's SATA controller can't hack SATA-2. What Points found out was that it also cannot hack the Western Digital hard disks I was buying, unless a custom and non-default jumper setting was put in place on the drive to force it to "OPT1 - 150 MB/s data transfer speed enabled." Since the 80gb drive I got yesterday was, in fact, SATA and not SATA-2 I have no idea what this setting is for. But Points suggested I try it and... sure enough, the disk is finally recognized. So, all hail Points for giving me the clue to solve this wretched puzzle.

I'd also like to take a moment to thank the fine folks at Acronis for making the incredibly awesome Acronis TrueImage software. With TrueImage I not only had a backup of Curmudgeon's dying disk drive (which was very nice to have when I literally blew the magic smoke out of the poor thing) but it also included a "CloneDrive" feature that copied everything off the old disk (including the boot sector) onto a new disk and gracefully resized partitions to deal with the differing capacity of the new drive. That made things go a lot more smoothly.

A big "Blow me" to Western Digital for putting that weirdass feature on their drives, and a "blow me" likewise goes out to Via for having such a freakishly twitchy SATA chipset.

And now I away to do some last-minute Christmas shopping with Mudgeon.

Comments

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

Glad to see it's working, dude. Happy holidays.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

So far, Acronis just keeps getting better. It actually makes dealing with Windows backups tolerable.

This isn't the first time WD has had weird jumper issues. On the old ATA disks, if you had a single drive, but left the jumper in for master, it wouldn't work at all. The jumper had to be removed for a single drive. I haven't had a problem with the 160GB SATA hard drive I had in my old system (which I replaced with a bigger better Seagate 7200.1 SATA hard drive).

[ya-wot-aver.livejournal.com]

See, now you know why I lean towards Seagate and Nvidia chipsets. Glad you got it workin.
Happy holidays to you and Curmudgeon!
Hope to see you guys a bit in the new year.

[captain18.livejournal.com]

I built my last PC right as SATA was becoming standard... I have a suspicious feeling this will mean I will come to have a hardware emergency at some point and be completely screwed by lack of access to this magical connection.

Actually, that's not entirely true. The wife's new laptop is SATA, and there was in fact a panic when the thing stopped booting and I had no way to even think of talking to the data on it.

Ah, technology...