HDD upgrade
Timeline of my new 500GB hard drive upgrade.
| 13.Jul | Realize I am running out of space on my primary 70GB drive. | |
| 17.Jul | Place an order for Samsung HD501LJ SATA drive. | |
| 19.Jul | The drive arrives a week later; no SATA cables included. | |
| 01.Aug | Place another order for SATA cables. | |
| 07.Aug | 1300 | Cables finally arrive. |
| 2145 | Open CPU cabinet to install the drive. | |
| 2155 | Open the front panel for insert. The drive can fit in the 3.5″ floppy disk bay. | |
| 2230 | The SATA power pins are spaced too short; can only reach any one drive in the final secured position. | |
| 2235 | Decide to retain only the bigger drive. | |
| 2240 | Unplug power, connect the drive to an available SATA bay on the motherboard, connect data and power cables; turn it on. | |
| 2245 | BIOS auto-recognizes the new drive. | |
| 2255 | Don’t see it in Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Computer Management → Storage → Disk Management. [I'm getting old.] | |
| 2300 | Begin formatting 500GB drive. | |
| 08.Aug | 0045 | Formatting complete. |
| 0120 | Slip-streamed Windows XP with SP2 installed. | |
| 0125 | Reboot and begin data copy from the old to the new drive. | |
| 0200 | Dead tired from the day’s work; to bed. | |
| 0715 | Check status; some things not copied. Select resync. | |
| 0815 | Copying complete. | |
| 2300 | Managed to connect both drives by reversing one drive in the bay. |
The new drive barely has any usable software, other than the freshly installed OS. It would probably take me another week to install everything we need—piece by piece, before it goes live and the old one decommissioned.
Update: Four hours after writing this post, I took another shot at the cables to see if I could retain the older drive. I reversed the drive in the disk bay in such a way that the data and power cables faced the front, instead of the usual back. With a bit of a trapeze, it worked! I managed to connect the drives to SATA power pins—merely separated by a couple of inches. Yay!