last exit for the lost

The past few weeks have provided a number of interesting adventures in computing. It all started when my hard drive started getting a little 'glitchy'. That is, programs started crashing unexpectedly, or simply not loading up at all and relaying unusual errors. Even the programs that were running were loading and operating much slower than normal. I knew what this meant. It had happened before. The hard drive was getting ready to give up the ghost. Within a couple of days of the onslaught of errors, I was thoroughly scanning dell.com for a suitable replacement. I hadn't budgeted for a new computer any time soon, so it had to be reasonably priced. No, it had to be downright cheap. Fortunately, (or so I though), I found just the right unit. It had more than twice my current processing speed, more than twice the hard drive space, and twice the RAM; and still it was one of their cheapest units. I contemplated whether or not I could really afford the new machine, but within a day I realized that I could not risk losing everything on my computer as well as losing access to the computer itself. Since I am a full time student and some of my work is exclusively online, the choice became quite clear. There was no way that, with only a few weeks left in the semester, I was going to take a chance. So, I ordered the machine (opting for the free shipping, hoping the order would be processed more quickly than the projected dates) and crossed my fingers, pleading with the Goddess of the Integrated Circuit to extend the life of my current computer long enough to get the new one running. My prayers were indeed answered. But as is often the case, my vague request came with vague results. I was delighted that my new computer arrived less than five days after I placed the order. Both the build time and delivery time were significantly less than Dell's estimations. I even happened to be home when when the great messenger of the gods himself arrived at my very doorstep, bearing that magical device which would be my salvation. I eagerly hauled the large box into the open space between the dining room and living room, which offered an ample area to remove the components for inspection before arranging them in the position once occupied by its predecessor. After a little while of unpacking and rearranging of furniture and hardware, I was ready to fire up the new beast. Some accessories I left unattached so as not to possibly overload or confuse the system immediately with new hardware. I pressed the smooth, grey, plastic button and watched the Dell® logo spring to life, followed by..."No operating system detected." Well, I thought, maybe I need to install it from the utility cd. I pop in the cd, press 'F12' for the boot menu, and choose to boot from cd. The system restarts and displays the message, "No operating system found." Needless to say, I was becoming less pleased by the moment. After going through a brief denial stage, I came to the conclusion that the machine had been sent without an operating system. I promptly found the invoice with all of the pertinent information and called Dell support to express my dilemma and to find out if there was something I just wasn't seeing or doing. The customer service representative was very kind, and politely told me that, indeed, my system did not come with a pre-installed operating system. It did not come with an operating system at all. (I guess that explains why it was so cheap.) I was shocked. I just couldn't fathom that Dell would send out a machine without an OS. I re-checked my order and my packing slip and sure enough...no mention of WinXP. Sigh...So I ask him if I can just purchase XP. He says he can give me XP-Pro at half off. I tell him that I don't want Pro, I just want Home edition, to which he replies that they don't sell Home ed. cd's, they only pre-install them. (Grrrr....) So, I tell him that I'll think about what I want to do and get back to him. Considering that the package I purchased made no mention of including Windows XP, I really had no arguable case here. So, I did what was necessary and picked up a copy and installed it. With a fresh operating system, I began installing the various programs and driver for which I had disks. By this time, the hard drive in my old machine had become completely unreadable. Fortunately, most of my documents and music were stored on a second drive. I installed the second drive on the new machine and was able to retrieve nearly all of my important information. There were some program files, however, that needed to be downloaded again. All seemed to be going relatively well now. That is, until I discovered a peculiar anomaly with the hard drive in the new system. As I was transferring some data from one drive to the other, I noticed that only 32GB of my 80GMB drive were being recognized. My first thought was that perhaps the wrong drive had been installed by Dell. I checked the model number and searched it online, discovering that the drive was indeed an 80GB dive. I quickly performed a Google search with a few keywords including the model number and “problem”. One of the first results yielded was a forum posting concerning precisely the same situation. Those who responded with proposed solutions seemed to unanimously agree that the person's bios needed to be updated. Feeling fairly confident that this must be the problem, I contacted a bios dealer. After discussing my situation and giving the appropriate bios information, he informed me that I already had the most current version available. Now I was getting particularly frustrated, and a little worried too. My old machine was completely useless, and it appeared that I may have to return the new one so that the appropriate configurations could be set. I had already been thinking about getting an additional drive. Since I compose music on the computer, my hard drive space is used up very rapidly. I've also been thinking about starting some video work, which eats up about 100MB a minute (uncompressed). So I decided that this would be a good time to go a head with the upgrade. This way, I could also back up my entire 80MB (or 32 as the case may be) drive just in case I ended up having to send the whole thing back. As I browsed the various makes and models of hard drives, I noticed that that there wasn't a remarkable difference in price from one size to the next. I decided upon 300GB Seagate drive. While installing the new drive, I decided to take a look at the manual just in case there was some unusual configuration I should be aware of. While scanning the section on jumper configurations, I saw something that caused me to stop and reflect. There was a jumper setting that caused the drive to be restricted to 32GB. Hmm, I thought, my other drive is only reading as 32GB. Even though my “80” gig drive is not a Seagate, I figured that most hd configurations are probably pretty much the same. So I checked the jumper configuration and sure enough, it had been set to limit the drive to 32GB. While I was very happy to have made this discovery, it was also frustrating to think that they (Dell) had sent it out to me this way. After changing the jumper setting, the drive was immediately recognized as an 80GB drive. Of course, now I had 45+ gigs of unformatted, unpartitioned space. What to do...what to do.... Well, I did what any glutton for punishment would do: I decided to install Linux. My first attempt at an installation proved to be very educational; unsuccessful, but educational. I didn't realize until later, but my initial distribution choice, Gentoo, had to be compiled completely manually. Now, to some, the idea that I might not compile my own Linux kernel may seem appalling, dishonorable even. However, I was simply unprepared for the task. Comparatively, the other distributions I've tried have seemed exceedingly user friendly. After my failure with Gentoo (which I may try again in the future) I decided to try Red Hat 9 based on a friend's suggestion. Well, that didn't work out either because the second disk in the set of three must have burned improperly. The installation, though seemingly user friendly, stalled every time disk 2 was called for. At this point I was getting a little frustrated with the whole Linux thing, and wondering why I was wasting my time with it at all. The third try changed all of that though. I found a distribution called Libranet which used the Debian kernel. So, I downloaded the ISO's, burned them to disk, and decided to give this one more shot. I have to say that Libranet was very easy to install, and even recognized most of my hardware. After a few days of familiarizing myself with Libranet, I was feeling comfortable enough with the Debian format to try out a straight-up Debian install, without the extra Libranet applications. The pure Debian install went fine, but I realized a couple of things: Firstly, that some of the Libranet applications I thought were useless, were actually quite useful. For instance, it has an 'Admin-menu'. I didn't really see the usefulness of it until it was no longer available. Secondly, there isn't nearly as much support for Debian as there is for Red Hat based distributions. I'm still not exactly sure why this is, but the newest versions of of many programs seem to be made available for Debian last, if at all. I suppose, though, that once I learn more about compiling from source it won't really matter. Still, it seems strange that packages are made for Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, and others, but often exclude Debian. So, finally I decided that it was time to give Red Hat another shot. But, rather than using my faulty Red Hat 9, I downloaded all four Fedora 3 disks. Fedora is what I'm currently reviewing, and so far it has been my favorite “out of the box” distribution. For example, it includes Mozilla's Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client which I had to go through great pains to install with Debian; having to deal with numerous outdated dependencies. In fact all of the software that came with it was more recent than was offered with Debian. The kernel is also much more recent than is available with Debian. And, it recognized all of my hardware. Well, I'll end my rant here for now, but perhaps I'll post an update to this in the future.