OMG I'd forgotten...

...how much trouble it is to work on pcs.

I now remember how annoyingly frustrating - yet rewarding - pc work
was for me back when that's all I did at home. It can be almost
addictive, because you don't want to let it "win." You want to
overcome it all and get it working and it's a power struggle, really,
between you and the machine - and you win. Eventually.

But not today. I'm not that patient.

I bought a new SATA drive for Raven and intended to reinstall XP on
it. Then I intended to copy that partition to another hard drive for
safekeeping, so next time I just reinstall windows - and all basic
drivers, programs, etc - by doing a partition to partition copy.

So XP doesn't see SATA drivers natively. You have to plop in a
diskette with the drivers on it, then let Windows get that. I get
error messages. I try something new. Different messages. You know
what? I spent three hours figuring this out already, and I've got
other stuff I'd like to do on my day off. So I'm going to go find my
IDE drive and simply reformat the bugger. It's not like I have much
to save anyway, and it's partitioned, so I can just dump it to
another partition, reinstall, and whammo, all good. Besides, this
will give me a chance to use that new driver collector I found. :)

Egads.

Now, I plugged my SATA drive into my mac via my external hard drive
to usb adapter thingie, and it saw it just fine. I even partitioned
it so I didn't have to do it on the pc, and it even allowed me to
format the partitions with NTFS.

Macs rule. PC's drool. I still want to build another pc, though.
Mom is trying to save money for a new one and wants me to build it
for her. As much as I don't look forward to her complaints when
things go wrong (she lives too far away for me to be of real use to
her), I am looking forward to the actual build. I must be a
masochist or something.

~nv