MetaFilter is temporarily down while I upgrade the hard drive
Reformatting blog:
2:00pm
It should be back in a couple of hours (4 or 5pm PST)
2-3pm
Various problems persist while I try to format the new 6Gb drive (had old stuff on it that needed deleting). As a slave, it inserted itself as drive D:\, in between the two partitions on the original drive, which is bad. Finding what was running, or trying to run, on drive D:\ took an hour, so I can delete all the old stuff now.
3:00pm
Actually, knowing Win NT, it won't go well, and I'll end up losing everything. Wish me luck.
3:05pm
New drive reformats ok, begin ghosting it in a few minutes
3:45pm
I've copied half of the old drive on the new drive as a new partition, but it was the wrong partition, so I have to do it all over again....ugh.
4-4:30pm
You know that crap about Murphy's Law? It's true. It should be referred to as the Fundamental Universal Theory of Murphy and Its Interactions With All Things In the Universe.
I can't get the machine to boot on the A drive, then I realized I popped the power for it while putting in the second drive...then it wouldn't run on bootup, so the interface cable was upside down. Now it seems to be working, but I can't get a startup disk to boot to a command line, so I can't run ghost and be done with it...ugh.
4:40pm
I just realized I can count the number of hard drive upgrades that went smoothly during my life on one hand.
4:45pm
A:\ ghost
Critical Error: Abort, Retry, Fail?_
4:54pm
Jessamyn was kind enough to send me this story, which hits pretty close to home. I know what the first thing I'm going to do when I'm finally finished...take a sledgehammer to the server...
5:00pm
I think my copy of ghost.exe is bad, I'm hunting for a new copy. This isn't going well
5:15pm
Got a new copy of ghost from here, started a copy of one partition to another and...
NTFS Error. NTFS Logfile has not been flushed. Restart NT and try again.
I'm proceeding with the copying, even with the errors. I'm sure nothing will go wrong now... :)
5:30pm
Copying complete, unplug old drive, reboot, which results in:
A kernal file is missing from the disk
Insert a system diskette and restart
the system
back to square one...
5:40pm
Error checking drive before ghost attempt #2.
Hearing about superbowl commercials I'm missing via icq:
friend: You just missed a commerical of a horse giving birth, with narration at end: "Congratulations, fella." (then budweiser logo)
friend: I'm confused as hell
me: "I bet seeing the birthing process and a horse's birth canal makes you really thirsty for a cold one."
6:20pm
My friend Matt just sent me a bit of the Cat Herders commercial (7.6Mb mpeg) he captured. I haven't laughed that much in a while.
6:45pm
After doing a full error check on the original drive, and attempting a second ghosting of it, it died again with the same errors. I give up. I'll try doing a full backup from tape next week sometime. ugh, 6.5 hours wasted.