So, this is a bit late, but I finally did it. I know I’ve been talking about it and getting mocked about it, but I finally got another computer up and running right next to my other computer.
The last bit I needed was a second monitor. Since the LCD I’d been using before was my old and non-standard SGI flat panel, I ran into a unique problem. The SGI’s always had weird issues with DVI input, but when I bought a new, inexpensive (yet slightly more powerful than the top-of-the-line card I had bought a few years ago) video card, it just refused to work properly at high resolutions. I was planning on just using an old monitor for the second computer, but since my primary monitor wasn’t working with my primary machine, it was time to upgrade.
I ended up getting a Gateway FPD2275W, because I wanted to get something widescreen that also took video in. This also had the added benefit of component in, in addition to the composite, S-Video, VGA and DVI. It’s very nice and does things like picture-in-picture and autoselecting inputs.
The other component I needed for the other computer was a hard drive, so when I was at Fry’s I also bought an inexpensive, small hard drive. But when I put it into the new computer (with the older motherboard), it refused to recognize it…
And this is where things start to go horribly wrong. My inherent laziness prevented me from simply taking the hard drive back to Fry’s and exchanging it for one which worked (or was the right ATA or blah blah whatever prevented it from working). Instead I noticed my existing computer had two hard drives in it, one of which was tiny, with only system files on it, and the other had all the programs. So I got the crazy idea to just take the small out one (after copying data off it, of course) and using it as the drive in the new computer.
In a flash of brilliance, I decided to disable the hard drive in the BIOS and boot up the computer and see if it works before physically removing the hard drive (which is sort of an ordeal in the Shuttle mini-case). This is when I realized that the Windows boot menu that I’d been skipping through all this time, which had two copies of Windows 2000 on it, had been defaulting to the copy of Windows installed on the small hard drive, not the one on the large hard drive. This meant that all my settings and junk were on the small hard drive. I booted into the other one, and it worked fine, so I just changed the boot.ini to point to it and removed the hard drive and installed it into the new machine.
Anyone who’s ever done this sort of thing knows that it’s a crapshoot when you take a hard drive with an existing OS install on it and drop it into brand new hardware and expect it to work. It didn’t. (I had a little interlude when I forgot that I had to copy over certain system files onto the hard drive so the OS would actually bootstrap in the first place.) In fact, I started getting weird memory and file read errors when booting off of the install disc…
(Meanwhile on the other computer, it was suddenly distraught, because FFXI wasn’t installed on that copy of Windows, so I had to reinstall.)
… and this was when error bells started going off in the back of my head. I’d seen this before! I knew what this was! I’ll give you folks at home some time to think of what it could possibly be. That’s right! Bad memory! One of the sticks, which worked perfectly fine the last time this computer was used, had gone bad at some point when they were sitting around unused. Removing that made it work, but the existing Windows install was still unhappy booting off the hardware, it was missing some registry stuff from the programs I needed. I did a manual registry copy over, and most of it went away, but FFXI refused to run. I had to install FFXI from scratch, which is a 3-4 hour process when you include the downloading and patching.
So I had managed to turn one perfectly working computer into two sort-of working computers, neither of which ran FFXI. The new hardware had windows running, but FFXI wouldn’t boot up without the auto-installer kicking in for some stupid reason, and the sound didn’t work. The existing hardware had finished it’s install, but when I fired up FFXI it was all sorts of clunky and slow and unusable so I went to bed Saturday night all upset.
When I woke up the next morning, I had the brilliant idea to actually make sure all the hardware drivers were installed on the shuttle, and lo-and-behold, the motherboard drivers weren’t… once installed FFXI was happy and purring. The new hardware followed suit not to long thereafter when the fresh install of FFXI finished.
So now I can dualbox FFXI (or FFXI and WoW, ’cause WoW runs a lot better on the desktop than my laptop), usually me on my primary machine and
That sounds like a FUN adventure indeed, and makes me want to actually set up my other computer. But I’d have to get a bigger desk. … and actually, y’know, have another account to dual-box.
… or something.
You should look into getting a Airport Express Base Station so you don’t have to deal with a long ass e-net cable.
I have one. I just haven’t bothered, because I’ll eventually get a net card for the computer.
Ah bummer..
Poor Hammy. 🙂 I had to go through something similar when I got a new computer and wanted to use the HD of my old one as a slave drive,but luckily, it didn’t involve anything super-technical, and all went well.
At least your system is up and running, so that’s good. ^.^b