Classical Gas
www.classictrials.co.uk
July 2001 - Part 1
Digital Drama
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Taking a rest from trial's machinery, Michael battles with the insides of his computer |
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I have always liked working and playing with computers. While I am not a professional, I reckon myself to have a fair degree of knowledge. I think I first got to grips with them back in the late 60’s when I was a student, at what was then Hatfield Polytechnic, where I studied computing as part of my engineering course. We were taught Algol. When it came to write our programs, we typed them in on a Teletype machine, which produced a punched tape. You left this in an envelope and the operators fed this into the computer, which produced another tape as output. You then ran it through the Teletype to get a print out. We thought this was wonderful, could you ever want anything more?
Well today, the answer is yes. What we all want is more hard disk space! I am sure you have all been there. When you bring your shinny new machine home it appears to have tons and tons of room but gradually it fills up and you have nothing left. I long ago discovered how necessary it is to purge the system of *.tmp files, the internet cache and unwanted Cookies but it still fills up.
At home its partly all those graphic files, but the main reason is the heavyweight games that sit on the family computer in the dinning room. Age of Empires, Championship Manager TOCA2, Colin McRae Rally 2 plus a few more and the 10 Gig hard disk in our Evesham was full. Junior and I cleaned as much stuff off as we could but there was no doubt we needed a bigger drive.
I had upgraded a disc drive before so I wasn’t to intimidated. The existing drive was a Maxtor and the local PC World had a variety of Maxtor’s on sale. We choose a 45GB Diamond Max Plus, compatible with Windows 98 and providing "Increased Capacity and Outstanding Performance – It’s as easy as 1,2,3!" Before buying it, I looked up all the specs and installation instructions on the Internet. It all seemed straightforward. The main thing was that the BIOS would recognise the increased capacity drive and it seemed it would!
Our existing 10 GB drive was partitioned into C and D. The idea was to install the new drive as C and D, each having a partition of 22.5 Gig and to leave the old drive in place as E and F and use it to back up files. The web site, installation instructions the blurb on the box and the man at PC World all said this was fine and absolutely straightforward. You fit the drive in a vacant bay, connect up the cable and Maxtor’s MaxBlast software would set the whole thing up automatically. We didn’t mess about. We could probably have got the drive a few quid cheaper if we had shopped around but we didn’t bother. We, Junior and I paid PC World 170 quid and took our pride and joy home.
The Maxtor kit came with all the cables and stuff. The physical installation went OK. Our Evesham has a nice big case and there was a vacant drive bay sitting there ready and waiting. Junior now withdrew to leave Dad to do the work! When I opened the case, it was full of dust and fluff so took the opportunity to give it a jolly good clean. The problem is that the cooling fans act like a vacuum cleaner, sucking all the bits in the air into the machinery.
Within an hour I was ready to fire her up and configure the drive. I put the MaxBlast floppy in the A drive and booted the machine. It recognised that both the new drive and old drives were installed, great. It also noted that the new drive was not formatted, superb. It then went through a series of questions on how we would like the new drive partitioned. I gave the answer as 2 x 22.5 Gig and that I would like the new drive to be the master and the old the slave. It seemed fine with that and went on to ask if we would like to copy the contents of the old drive to the new one. Hey, this easy, that’s exactly what I wanted so I said yes, pressed the return key and sat back. The computer didn’t like that and responded to say that it couldn’t copy the contents of the drive. Oh dear, but things were worse, on probing I discovered that we didn’t have the new drive partitioned into 2 x 22.5 GB, I had 2 x 8 point something’s.
I didn’t know what the problem was but knew all was not well. Rather than plough on in ignorance I restored things to the way they were before we started, got the computer working in its original guise and stared to investigate. The first thing I did was to look up what motherboard was in the Evesham. It was a Chaintech and I looked up their site. Eureka, I found the problem. Our motherboard used a modified Award BIOS. Ours was dated October 1999 and in November they changed it because the old one wouldn’t recognise drives larger than eight point something. They had an upgraded BIOS available for downloading. The procedure seemed a bit complicated but this seemed to be the way to solve the problem.
It involved installing something called a flash utility and as this was all low-level stuff, it had to be done in DOS. I approached this with trepidation because if it went wrong we would have no BIOS chip and a very dead computer. Fortunately, it all went well and I reconnected the new drive and ran MaxBlast again. I got a bit further. This time for reasons I can’t remember I decided to configure the new drive as 3 x 15 Gig. It did this OK but when it came to copy the contents of the old drive it still refused. What’s more when I looked at the partitions things were very strange. C was 15 Gig; D was five Gig and so on.
I retired to contemplate. Deep in my bookcase, I had an old DOS 5 manual. Delving into this I discovered that the drive letters are assigned by the BIOS during the boot sequence in a fixed order. C is given to the first partition on the master drive, D to the first partition on the slave drive, E the second partition on the master and so on. I went back and fiddled with the computer and found that whatever I did I couldn’t change this.
As I probed deeper into the settings I found something else. The original drive had something called EZ-BIOS on it. Then the penny dropped. Evesham had installed my 10 GB drive at a time when the motherboard BIOS wouldn’t recognise anything above 8.3. Maxtor fixed this by providing a disk based BIOS which loaded during the Boot sequence. Somehow, this prevented the drive to drive copy program from working.
By now, I decided to abandon the original plan and keep the original drive as the master and use the new one as the slave. I probably could have solved the problem by reformatting the original Maxtor using the new Award BIOS rather than EZ-BIOS but I’d had enough. So, I set up the new drive as the slave using EZ-BIOS as well. There were other problems of course, like the CD ROM was now "I" instead of "E" and the Zip was "H" instead of "B". This involved reinstalling some of the software, especially the games.
Anyway, we now have a computer with 55GB of hard drive storage and it appears to work, and it only took four days spread over two weeks!
Published 14th July 2001
