From: Michael G Schwern
Date: 08:09 on 30 Aug 2007
Subject: SATA drive + Windows == hate
I got sick of scrounging around for drive space for all my various media WHICH
I ASSURE YOU IS ALL LEGITIMATELY PURCHASED COMPLETE WITH RECEIPTS (ok, is the
RIAA goon gone) and when my 200gig external drive finally kicked the bucket I
decided to go on a drive buying spree.
500 gig external USB 2 drive from Dell, $103
160 gig notebook drive from Newegg, $100
400 gig internal drive from Newegg, $85.
Not having to burn my porn to DVDs: priceless.
The external drive for media and backup, the notebook drive for my Macbook and
the internal drive for my Windows gaming PC. Great! They all arrive...
Hmm... what's this funny lookin connector on the internal drive? Oh, its a
SATA drive! Sure, my motherboard does SATA, cool. Ok, now to find a SATA
cable... SATA cable... hmmm...
They didn't include a cable.
Call around, find out Free Geek sells SATA cables for a $1, bike over, buy a
couple of those and a VGA extender (cuz they're handy).
Ok, ready. Plug it in. Boot up the PC. Aaaaaaand...
"Windows has discovered a Mass Storage Device it does not recognize".
Mass Storage Device? Ok, whatever crazy thing you want to call it, Windows.
Pop in the Windows CD and let it find the driver... no driver found. *sigh*
*grumble* Dig up the motherboard user manual online... SATA RAID mode... oh,
so by default the motherboard turns any SATA drives into a RAID. Kinda neat,
but, of course, now I need to find drivers...
Dig around on the motherboard's web site... find the drivers and to install
them... what?! I need a FLOPPY DISK?! Who in the hell has a floppy disk
anymore?! Back to the motherboard manual. Figure out how to turn off RAID
mode. Reboot. BIOS. Save. Boot again.
Now Windows doesn't see ANY new hardware! Grrr. Back to the motherboard
page... dig around, find the Windows XP non-RAID SATA drivers, download,
install, reboot.
Still doesn't detect any new hardware. ARGH!!! Google for instructions about
installing a new hard drive. Learn the archaic command I have to type into
"run" to bring up the drive manager. Initialize the drive. Ok, format it as
FAT32...
It only offers NTFS. *thud* No, I don't want to use a disk format that can
only be written to by Windows. Why the hell aren't you offering me FAT32?!
Maybe the drive is too big, FAT32 is pretty old... wikipedia... no, FAT32
supports up to 8 Tb. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!
More wikipedia reading... oh, surprise, its just Microsoft's formatting tool
that's crap! It won't format anything over 32 gigs. Must be forcing everyone
to use NTFS (remember, the one only Microsoft operating systems can write to).
More wikipedia... find a link to fat32format to solve this. Download, install.
Initialize the drive with the Drive Manager. Give it a drive letter. Run
fat32format. FINALLY A WORKING DRIVE! HALLE-FUCKING-LUYA!
Now to move the contents of my C: drive onto it in such a way that it will not
cripple the operating system. Oh that will be fun.
For comparison, installing my new drive into OS X was much less hateful.
1) Plug in external drive.
2) Use Disk Utility's nice, graphical partitioner to make an HFS+ partition
(ironically, it had no trouble making a 400 gig FAT32 partition)
3) Use rsyncx's somewhat clunky GUI to backup my drive and make the new
one bootable. (iBackup would have been easier, but old habits die hard.
About as hard as I want those eggs. [nevermind])
4) Shutdown.
5) Remove old drive via the battery bay.
6) Plug in new drive.
7) Boot from external drive.
8) OS X says "hey, I found an unformatted drive! Do you want to format it?"
Why yes I would!
9) rsyncx from external drive to new internal drive.
10) Reboot.
11) Consider what to do with all the free space.
From: Peter da Silva Date: 16:22 on 30 Aug 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate On Aug 30, 2007, at 2:09, Michael G Schwern wrote: > 3) Use rsyncx's somewhat clunky GUI to backup my drive and make the > new > one bootable. 13) Discover that rsync has removed some magic metadata from some obscure file and now some old application won't work, even if I force it to run under Rosetta. Hey, Apple, how about finishing up the HFS-metadata-emulation-for-UFS so I can run this crap from UFS partitions, which don't freak out and corrupt themselves when free space gets below 10% and you can't find contiguous space for a spicy new catalog extent or something, AND the metadata magic cookies get stored in only mildly hateful dot-underscore-filename files that I can tweeze out and restore by hand if I need to? (PS, Microsoft... same to you and NTFS ACLs and forks and read-locked files) (PPS, I'm sure that if BeOS hadn't died I'd be hating BeFS too) (PPPS, Anyone here who likes RMS file types on VAX/VMS, have a bilabial fricative)
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 00:12 on 05 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate Peter da Silva wrote: > > On Aug 30, 2007, at 2:09, Michael G Schwern wrote: > >> 3) Use rsyncx's somewhat clunky GUI to backup my drive and make the new >> one bootable. > > 13) Discover that rsync has removed some magic metadata from some > obscure file and now some old application won't work, even if I force it > to run under Rosetta. Note: rsyncX <--- the X is for "hacked to work with OS X metadata". http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html Apparently -E will do it in normal rsync, too. rsyncx is, unfortunately, getting old and no updates are in sight. The particular problem I hit is the process for making an Intel mac system disk bootable is different from a PowerPC Mac. I was using the old way generated by rsyncx's GUI which resulted in an unbootable drive. And the API for bless is byzantine. I wound up using asr for the full backup/restore according to these instructions. It erased the drive and made it bootable. Yay! http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html The fact that this wasn't just "clicky clicky" even on a Mac is hateful. Replacing a hard drive is a user-level action. This should be a simple process. 1) Fire up OS X supplied backup application. 2) Pick the external drive (or disk image on that drive) to backup to. 3) Click button and go have a sandwich. 4) Restart from OS X install CD. Or it makes a boot CD for you. Or it makes it so you restart from the external backup. 5) Remove old drive, put in new drive. Reboot. 6) OS X asks "would you like to restore your system from a drive or image?" 7) Pick the drive/image. 8) Click button and go have another sandwich. If the backup wasn't properly made bootable on this Mac it would inform you, and make it so. Not rocket science. I'm sure there's a 3rd party app out there somewhere which does this, but the fact that the OS X install disk *only* let's you restore from a *bootable* backup and then *only* via Firewire and it *only* let's you copy your users, prefs and applications over, not the whole custom tweaked system, is hateful.
From: Peter da Silva Date: 00:33 on 05 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate On Sep 4, 2007, at 18:12, Michael G Schwern wrote: > Note: rsyncX <--- the X is for "hacked to work with OS X metadata". > http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html That's what it says. I believed it. That was a mistake. > The fact that this wasn't just "clicky clicky" even on a Mac is > hateful. > Replacing a hard drive is a user-level action. This should be a > simple process. Or at least something comparable to a simple "disklabel" command. That the combination of HFS+ and UNIX requires worse shenanigans than either is hateful. But at least Apple isn't Microsoft, and they don't *deliberately* make cloning a bootable system as hard as possible.
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 14:58 on 10 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate On 30/08/07 16:22 Peter da Silva wrote: > (PPPS, Anyone here who likes RMS file types on VAX/VMS, have a bilabial > fricative) Don't you mean "linguolabial trill"? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilabial_fricative
From: Peter da Silva Date: 15:44 on 10 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate On 10-Sep-2007, at 08:58, Robert Rothenberg wrote: > On 30/08/07 16:22 Peter da Silva wrote: >> (PPPS, Anyone here who likes RMS file types on VAX/VMS, have a >> bilabial >> fricative) > Don't you mean "linguolabial trill"? > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilabial_fricative Live and learn. Though raspberries can be blown with or without the tongue. The classic "monkey fart" chimpanzee-style raspberry doesn't involve the tongue at all. What's the resale value of a linguolabial trill?
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 00:03 on 11 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate > Hey, Apple, how about finishing up the HFS-metadata-emulation-for-UFS > so I can run this crap from UFS partitions, which don't freak out and > corrupt themselves when free space gets below 10% and you can't find > contiguous space for a spicy new catalog extent or something, AND the > metadata magic cookies get stored in only mildly hateful > dot-underscore-filename files that I can tweeze out and restore by hand > if I need to? But even if Apple did that, app writers who assumed the case-lackness of HFS would fuck you over ByHavingTooMuchfunwithTHEIRfileNames.
From: Peter da Silva Date: 00:30 on 11 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate On Sep 10, 2007, at 18:03, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > But even if Apple did that, app writers who assumed the case-lackness > of > HFS would fuck you over ByHavingTooMuchfunwithTHEIRfileNames. Yeh, but I know how to handle that hate, from years of NTFS abuse.
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 00:43 on 11 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate Peter da Silva wrote: > On Sep 10, 2007, at 18:03, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: >> But even if Apple did that, app writers who assumed the case-lackness >> of >> HFS would fuck you over ByHavingTooMuchfunwithTHEIRfileNames. > > Yeh, but I know how to handle that hate, from years of NTFS abuse. Take a staple gun and "park" the disk? > >
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 00:44 on 11 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > Peter da Silva wrote: >> On Sep 10, 2007, at 18:03, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: >>> But even if Apple did that, app writers who assumed the case-lackness >>> of >>> HFS would fuck you over ByHavingTooMuchfunwithTHEIRfileNames. >> Yeh, but I know how to handle that hate, from years of NTFS abuse. > > Take a staple gun and "park" the disk? For really high RPM disks one of course would need a nail gun. >> > >
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 00:22 on 12 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 07:44:23PM -0400, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > > Take a staple gun and "park" the disk? > > For really high RPM disks one of course would need a nail gun. Nail guns are fun. [Anything that needs to be powered by gases seems to be more fun than anything electric. I've yet to play with tools powered by internal combustion engines ...] But I'm sure what would happen if you fired a nail through a spinning disk. Rather than the nail punching cleanly, would the platters shatter? Nicholas Clark
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 01:31 on 12 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate Nicholas Clark wrote: > On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 07:44:23PM -0400, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: >> Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > >>> Take a staple gun and "park" the disk? >> For really high RPM disks one of course would need a nail gun. > > Nail guns are fun. > > [Anything that needs to be powered by gases seems to be more fun than anything > electric. I've yet to play with tools powered by internal combustion engines > ...] Like all the hot air used to power this list. :P
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 01:44 on 12 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate Nicholas Clark wrote: > On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 07:44:23PM -0400, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: >> Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > >>> Take a staple gun and "park" the disk? >> For really high RPM disks one of course would need a nail gun. > > Nail guns are fun. > > [Anything that needs to be powered by gases seems to be more fun than anything > electric. I've yet to play with tools powered by internal combustion engines > ...] > > But I'm sure what would happen if you fired a nail through a spinning disk. > Rather than the nail punching cleanly, would the platters shatter? Only experimentation will tell. (Disclaimer: I refuse to be responsible for missing limbs, eyeballs, scalps, and the like.) > Nicholas Clark > >
From: Jonathan Stowe Date: 08:28 on 12 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 00:22 +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: > I've yet to play with tools powered by internal combustion engines They mostly seem to be used in agriculture, horticulture and civil engineering. I think we need a test of the relative effects of chainsaws, stumpcutters and disk cutters and so forth on various pieces of computer hardware. /J\
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 12:22 on 12 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate Jonathan Stowe wrote: > On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 00:22 +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: >> I've yet to play with tools powered by internal combustion engines > > They mostly seem to be used in agriculture, horticulture and civil > engineering. I think we need a test of the relative effects of > chainsaws, stumpcutters and disk cutters and so forth on various pieces > of computer hardware. Wood chippers and cement mixers come to mind. Wouldn't programs have more respect for you if you had a chainsaw for a debugger? > /J\ >
From: demerphq Date: 12:45 on 12 Sep 2007 Subject: Re: SATA drive + Windows == hate On 9/12/07, Nicholas Clark <nick@xxxx.xxx> wrote: > On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 07:44:23PM -0400, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > > Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > > > > Take a staple gun and "park" the disk? > > > > For really high RPM disks one of course would need a nail gun. > > Nail guns are fun. > > [Anything that needs to be powered by gases seems to be more fun than anything > electric. I've yet to play with tools powered by internal combustion engines > ...] Converting trees to firewood with a gas powered chain saw is one of the most satisfying experiences of manliness that one can find (that doesn't involve having sex anyway). :-) Highly recommended. Just be careful with the saw! Itll take your arm or leg off faster than you can blink an eye! Yves
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