At long last, the saga of my hard disk is at an end.
Here’s a summary of the highlights:
- Built a whizz-bang Half Life 2 killing PC at the start of the year consisting of 2x 160gb SATA drives
- Six weeks ago, whilst doing normal windows clicking, everything freezes
- Reboots fail. Panic sets in. “Cyclic Redundancy failure” becomes a common term.
- Realise my primary drive is about to die. Commence backing up everything in sight.
- Speak to vendors who give me a returns number.
- Waste loads of time but finally get HDD and connecting cable back to vendor.
- Wait
- Wait
- Wait
- Phone vendor and nag. Vendor suddenly realises they can’t replace drive so offer a different drive.
- Get drive 2 days later – minus connection cable
- Frustration sets in
- Lots of phone-calls, lots of hold music.
- Get through on three separate occasions. Am promised sodding connection cable on three separate occasions
- A full week after the drive turns up, the cable turns up.
Rubbish service isn’t it? Although the drive I got last week looks absolutely spanking new it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn it’s duff.
So, I’m geeking out tonight, opening PCs and playing with partitions. My remaining drive has been working really hard and, seeing as it was my second drive with heaps of data on it, I just added a new partition to it to plonk the OS on it. Having XP and a paging file three partitions in on your system is a good way of dropping performance. If you ever feel like your machine is running too efficiently I seriously recommend copying my example.