A couple of days with my new Mac Pro and all is going well. Filled up the the four hard drive bays with a couple of 1TB drives, one to hold all my data and the other to back it up; and a 320GB drive so I can install Windows for gaming.
Make a substantial dent in the 1TB storage by consolidating my music, photos and movies from all over my network into a single place, and then consider the Windows install.
First I need a legal edition of Windows, so off down to Tukcom where a request for a legal copy of anything is always met with bewilderment. But eventually someone reaches down into a drawer and brings out a dusty real version, although it manages to avoid being entirely legal by being an “OEM Version - only to be sold with a new machine”.
Back home and fire up Mac’s Boot Camp which will lead me through an install of Windows on the new drive. Soon the low-res loveliness of the XP install is shimmering on the screen and asking me to choose a drive. As my XP drive is the same size as my boot drive, I am not sure which to choose, so decide to exit and do some further checking. But of course the XP install process won’t let you exit, so I have to restart the machine.
Then… nothing. Just a blank screen and flashing cursor. Nothing.
I have just bought an industrial grade workstation which should work flawlessly for years and have managed to reduce it to a useless chunk of aluminium using only an XP install disk and the power button. Bugger. And other words.
This is not good news, but don’t panic. Naturally I panic and drives are ripped out of bays, DVD drives are pulled out of slots so the stupid XP disk can be extracted and sworn at.
Eventually, after about half an hour of blind panic I insert the Mac OS disk and boot from that. It finds a perfectly normal boot drive in bay 1, so I choose to boot from that and all is OK again.
After a shower to remove the smell of fear, I realise what happened. XP had locked me into drive 4 as a boot drive for the duration of the install (which always involves multiple reboots); and when I cancelled the install it had not removed the flag and was trying to boot from a blank disk. Partially my fault I suppose, but I mainly blame XP install.
So, XP is now running on a separate drive, and I can choose whether to boot Mac OS or XP at start up. Have installed my newly acquired Empire Total War, but it is going to need the pending 4870 graphics upgrade before it runs at an acceptable speed.
And XP has only crashed twice so far. What a crock, please can we have Windows 7 soon?
Comments 🔗
2009-03-15| Billy saysI’m never been one to complain, especially since I am on K’s computer and you may confuse me for someone who gives a tinker’s bit do you think perhaps you may be over egging the technology thing ?
K’s, Biily the Brush, blow by blow of golf thingies are staring to look interesting on a comparisson scale
2009-03-16| Spike saysI am sorry that you have lost your “I never complain” virginity over this comparatively trivial matter.I suggest you cancel your subscription immediately, as I am about to announce “Pattaya Days Boring Technology Week” during which there will be posts such as “Twenty things to do with a USB stick that are illegal in five American states.” Anyway, nothing to see here, please move along. The next post is far more interesting.
2009-03-19| Billy saysIt is clear that I have to be more careful about leaving my computer on when I leave the room …
Looking forward to the USB stick exposition …