[Gloucs] A word of warning

[Maximillian Murphy]

Am 28.08.2006 um 08:47 schrieb David & Sharon:

> Why is it that when things are going well, human beings have a  
> desire to change them and end up messing up.
>
> I had a perfectly good Suse 10.1 system running, had loaded all the  
> mp3 libs and w32 codecs for a nice stable multimedia o/s. I could  
> send and receive e-mails, read news feeds and whilst doing that  
> listen to my mp3 collection.  If I wanted to play at messing up, I  
> had a kanotix/knoppix/debian partition (hda1) to play with, which  
> could be reloaded whenever I wanted, with whatever I wanted to play  
> with next.
>
> So *Why* did I listen to my son, "Can we put windows on please  
> Daddy?" After lots of cajoling, I decided to go ahead and let  
> windows take hda1, format it fat32 and install itself. Put in  
> Kanotix disc, chroot to my Suse partition - which had unexpectedly  
> gone(?!!), no that's ok, the drive number has changed, it's still  
> there but hda6 instead of 5. I tried editing Fstab to reflect the  
> change and re-run Grub-install, which complained about the disc  
> being really messed up and refused to do anything. Ok all is not  
> lost, had an old copy of Partition magic to run in the newly  
> installed windoze, which told me that I had no partitions and the  
> whole drive was Fat32(!?)
>
> Next step, re-install Suse, which then told me that my hdb (backup  
> disc) was messed up before crashing due to accumulated muck on the  
> cd's (perhaps). I found a spare partition and put on a copy of  
> Mandriva to give me the essentials, whilst washing the Suse cd set  
> and continuing to try and install.
>
> I now keep getting "DMA switched off" messages on boot and having  
> reloaded Suse, it takes twice as long to boot as it is trying to  
> access hdb as a linux formatted disc when it is fat32, despite my  
> having tried to tell it how it is formatted.
>
> I think there ought to be a moral here somewhere but 'steer well  
> clear of windoze' is as good as any I can think of.
>
> David

Long delayed response, I know, but the solution I use when I want to  
muck about with another OS is to put it on a completely different  
drive.  I install the hard drives in caddies that slot into the front  
of my machine, so I can pull out the hard drive and put in another in  
a matter of seconds without ever having to open the box.  It's just  
like taking a drawer out of a compactum.

I have never noticed a performance hit, but if you like I can run  
some tests with the HDD connected directly versus going through the  
drawer system.

Mine are made by "www.vipower.com".  Look for "mobile racks".  You  
need an outer frame, which fits into a 5 1/2" drive slot on your  
machine, and as many "inner frames" i.e. caddies as you have hard  
drives.  The outer frame is usually sold bundled with one inner.  I  
can't remember which UK distributor I used, but it was done on an ad- 
hoc basis with e-mail and a cheque in the post.  I pay about 5 GBP  
per inner frame and 15 GBP per outer frame (I use these a lot).  You  
can pay much more though depending on brand and whether you care  
about the frame being plastic versus aluminium (better cooling, and  
heat kills drives) and other such refinements.

The vipower cases come with a choice of a button or a key for  
releasing the drive.  Do specify which you want when putting in your  
order.  If you lose the key it's worth knowing that all the vipower  
keys are identical, so you don't need to rip apart the case to  
recover your drive.  Just order another case with a key.  At least,  
that's true for all I've bought so far and no, I haven't lost any  
keys yet!

Having different partitions for "home" and the rest of the system  
takes on a new bent:  I have 4Gb drives that contain nothing other  
than operating systems, and I have drives that contain my precious / 
home data.  Moving OS drives between computers doesn't usually work,  
maybe because I'm too lazy to find out which kernel modules are  
needed for both systems.  But all other types of hard drive swaps are  
easy and convenient.

Regards, Max
------------
Boxen: AMD 64/x86*4/G3/G4
OS: Gentoo, Debian, OSX, Win 98, 2000
Mapping:  Variable because of cold-swapping hard drives.