Fantastic Stupidity
Last night I finally decided to bite the bullet and get to upgrading my one computer at home. The issue with it was that the old motherboard, an Abit AI7, was that something died in the CMOS or whatnot that prevented it from starting normally. It would start POSTing, but after a moment it would give an error code on the board and start up again. Thus the fans would just start spinning, then it would die, then they would start spinning, but then they’d die again. I replaced the CMOS battery, I replaced the motherboard with another AI7, but with the same results. To fix it I would just never fully power down the system. It was fine rebooting, but starting it was a chore. I’d have to clear the CMOS via the jumper, swear at it a few times, and it would eventually start up.
I’m sure there was an actual good solution to the problem, but it worked.
To finally take care of the issue I decided to do an upgrade, and by upgrade I mean everything outside of the case and DVD drives. The little woman and I gave the case a good cleaning, put the new parts in (correct the first try no less!), plugged everything in and started it up. The XP install was going along well enough until the audio drivers for the motherboard wouldn’t load. I didn’t think much of it since the network drivers came in fine allowing me to continue my initial install path: AVG, firefox, video drivers, windows patches. The problem was that the video drivers told me that there was no space available on the C: drive.
“By golly that can’t be right,” I said, more or less, to myself, “that’s a gosh darned 500 gig drive in there. Of course there’s some fine space left on that good drive. I wonder what the renowned programmers have done this time?” I hit Window-E and saw something that made me throw up into my mouth a little: the C: drive had somehow ceased being the partition I had just created during the install that told me it would be the C partition and was now the card reader on my printer. Of course D: was the DVD burner, and E: was the hard drive. Of course the audio drivers were assuming they would be on the C drive where the other ones were using the system root logical. So when I told the Nvidia drivers to go on to the C: drive it balked since there are no cards in the reader.
Just to repeat. Windows assigned drive E: to my primary system hard drive and C: to my freaking printer’s card reader that I have never EVER used.
Brilliant!