it's funny because the 160GB is a seagate barracuda 7, while the ancient 27GB is a seagate barracuda 1. yep, the first generation IDE barracuda, and has been spinning for probably at least 60% of the past six years.
six years ago, this PC was state of the art; the 27GB barracuda was the fastest IDE drive one could buy. only seagate made 7200rpm IDE drives at that time, and it was a direct port of the SCSI barracuda. the one-week old drive is built flimsily by comparison, much like those infamous seagate "medalist" hard drives which are held together with metal tape.
now, it's simply old. the Linux kernel persistently complains that the BIOS is too old and so ACPI won't work.
anyway, i attached the 160GB drive and turned the thing on. Linux (CentOS 4.2) merrily found it, and i partitioned and formatted the thing. great, so far. copied a ton of files onto the drive (on a FAT32 partition, i've learned my lesson..) also created an NTFS partition for our favorite-to-hate OS (since my 27GB drive was all Linux, and that gets old on a home computer with no internet access).
i wasn't even aware if my old computer with its old BIOS has issues with the 137GB IDE limit. in fact i didn't know about that [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! 137GB limit..
anyway i later decided that i would install Win2k on the NTFS partition (Linux can make 'em, but it can't mkfs them). so i inserted the trusty Win2k boot CD.. selected the appropriate options, and it copied the installation files and rebooted. guess what... it wouldn't reboot successfully. it wouldn't boot at all.
i don't know if that's the 137GB bug, or if Windows can't boot (a la ancient LILO) if the partition it's on is above the 1024-cylinder limit.
anyway after much head-scratching, i put the 160GB on the secondary IDE (instead of primary); put the old 27GB back on the primary, and did some GRUB whacking so that the Windows *installer* could boot. the usual chainloader crap didn't work, i had to swap the two drives in GRUB. i actually have no idea why that is so, i just tried it and it worked.
so. on booting, GRUB appears. i select the Windows item, and Win2k starts up. hurray. that's a huge improvement from hanging at the BIOS level. anyhow, the dull boring Windows installation continued, and everything seemed fine. and that's when the complete annoyance of how *BARE* Windows is cropped up.
when Win2k installed, it left me in 640x480, 16-color mode. astounding. at least the sound worked.. (or so i thought)
after installation of the appropriate Nvidia drivers, things were better (but it's interesting to note that all the new Linux distributions support the Nvidia cards well, albeit with no 3D unless you get Nvidia's binary-only drivers). problem was, the sound cuts out after about 10 seconds of playing.
this is a known issue. it's a weird interaction between sound cards with Aureal Vortex sound processors, Nvidia video cards, and VIA motherboards. i knew about this long ago. in fact in Linux one had to use "setpci" to tweak some registers. But since Fedora (and CentOS) the kernel driver for the Vortex "knows" this and does it automagically. but obviously Win2k doesn't..
guess what.. it's nearly impossible to find Windows drivers for my defunct sound card. it's amazing that they could disappear so fast. well a six-year old computer *is* pretty much obsolete, but still.. and the "VIA 4in1" drivers have a new name now "VIA Hyperion" but old computers like mine can't use it. some more digging before the "VIA 4in1" could be found.
and there's more.. i put another hard drive on my computer's built-in HPT370 faux RAID controller. Linux had no problems at all driving this controller. but Win2k.. can't see the damn thing. yet another driver must be downloaded and installed. did i mention i have no internet access at home? that got old really quick..
i guess it's not fair comparing the circa-2005 CentOS (actually, kernel 2.6.9) with the circa-1999 Win2k. maybe WinXP does better in this regard (but i didn't have a WinXP license handy). still, Win2k out of the box can basically do nothing. oh, it can do Solitaire. microsoft's killer application. yeah, Win2k has a web browser. a bug-riddled, security-challenged web browser.
after using Linux as my work desktop for almost a decade (well, nine years to be exact) it's a bit of a shock to install Win2k. true, i used it regularly, but i'd forgotten the sheer terror of *installing* it. and i'd gotten used to the Linux kernel's "it works out of the box without having to download more drivers" behavior. and i'd forgotten that feeling you get when you realize that stock Win2k on the internet is like being in the prison shower and you drop your soap..
well i guess the experience is seamless for people with new computers, installing WinXP. but i can't help remembering what some guy said.. that Windows is as tough, or even tougher, to install than Linux, except most people get their PC's with Windows pre-installed so they never know how tough it is.
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