So I finally got around to working on my desktop, Belldandy, and get it up and running again. It was running Windows XP Professional SP2 before, but it was running really sluggish from all of the use that it got from me doing everything that I do. Several weeks, or I guess months now, I decided that I wanted to reinstall the operating system to make it more stable for users and for myself.

It used to be used as my primary machine, since it was the only one that I had. But since I bought my laptop, I’ve been using that as my primary computer. Belldandy has been turned into more of a web/ftp/file server since then and was doing a craptacular job at it. For the past couple weeks I’ve been trying hard to reinstall the operating system but I’ve run into many issues that I never would have expected. The first being that the BIOS did not want to boot from the CD/DVD drive that I was using. So the first thing I did was to double check to make sure that it was functional properly, which is did and I could read/write CD/DVDs while Windows XP was running. I then went back into the BIOS and checked in there to see if it even saw that the drive was connected, which it did. So I tried to boot from the CD once again, without success. I didn’t even get that “Press any key to boot from CD/DVD….” message. I restarted again to see if I had screwed up the boot order and that it was booting the HDD before the optical drive. The order was: Floppy, CD/DVD, HDD, . So… maybe the BIOS just didn’t like that drive for whatever dumb reason. I went and took one of the several optical drives I have lying around and plugged that in. The BIOS recognized it and it worked in Windows XP, but once again it did not work when trying to boot from the CD.

After scratching my head for some several days, I decided to give making a bootable USB drive a shot. I’m not even going to go into details about the issues I ran into this. The biggest issues probably came from my laptop running Windows 7… and I’m not gonna install XP on it just to make a bootable USB drive. So let’s see… CD/DVD install, bootable USB drive… what’s left? Oh! Let’s try installing Windows on the drive while it’s plugged in via USB/Firewire to my laptop since I know my laptop works fine. I had recently taken apart a couple of external hard drives to make them internal drives (I needed the extra outlets on my surge suppressor), and still had the guts from that around. so I plugged the board that controlled the external drive into my internal hard drive and viola! Insta-external hard drive! However… I never would’ve guessed… You can’t install Windows on a drive connected via USB/IEEE 1394. WTF MICROSHIT. If you’re so worried about people installing Windows on an external drive and using that on random computers then guess what, it’s easier than you think because I made an internal hard drive into an external in around five minutes.

After about a week of being frustrated and not wanting anything to deal with it, not to mention the research paper than I had to write and finish in a week, I decided to think some more about how to get an OS on the boot drive. I remembered that my mom’s computer was still being repaired/worked on and that there were several things wrong with it and I could probably talk my dad into letting me hook up my hard drive to install an OS since that computer was already being worked on. So I unplugged the bad hard drives (2 drives in a striped RAID configuration), plugged in my drive and inserted the Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD. It installed! Woo! Once I finally got back to my computer and installed the drive back in… I found out that 2008 comes as a blank shell by default. Neato. So I installed all of the features that I needed and rebooted.

Everything worked fine, minus the video card and wireless card. Surprise, surprise. The video card I have a CD for and the drivers are easy to find once I get online so I went to install my wireless card. Unfortunately the driver didn’t work. It installed, but when I went to reboot the linksys software didn’t run, nor did it detect my wireless card. So I went researching a bit to see if there was a newer driver for it. This is an older card and it was a fairly low-end card. Nope, there’s no driver for Vista/7/2008. Lovely. I was able to find out that the people who actually make the board for the card put out a new driver, but it doesn’t work at all so I’m stuck with no wireless… That means no ChaosRO until I get a new wireless NIC~

Anyways, I took the opportunity to take some newer pictures of my desktop since the ones that I do have suck.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 23:15 and is filed under NessyNET, News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.