Well, that was entertaining. In roughly the same way that playing rugby against a team of rabid hyenas is entertaining, but entertaining none the less.
I just spent most of the past hour deciphering IDE cables, master/slave jumper settings, and USB vs. serial keyboards in order to get my PC configured the way I wanted it. The end result is good (the 6GB drive is C:, a 4GB drive I had in my closet from when my iMac died is D:, and the 2GB drive is E:, which should make the CD-ROM F:, I suppose), and I’m in the process of getting Windows 2000 installed (for the third time in three days) on the 6GB drive. Success — but quite a few headaches in the process. And people keep trying to convince me that Wintel PCs are “as easy as” Macs these days?
Puh-leeeze.
However, in the midst of all this, I did figure out my issue with the 2GB drive from yesterday. It turns out that if you boot off the Windows 2000 CD-ROM, the setup utility will let you wipe a system partition. The problem I was having was that since the DOS level didn’t have USB drivers, I couldn’t “hit any key” to tell the BIOS boot menu to boot from the CD, so it was always booting off the drive — which explains why it then refused to nuke the drive. Once I found and plugged in my “old-school” serial keyboard, I was able to hit the “any” key, boot from the CD, and proceed with everything I wanted to do in the first place.
Once I did that, while I was poking around in the BIOS menus, I found an option to “enable USB in DOS” (or some such wording) that may allow me to use the USB keyboard at the DOS-level menus…but I discovered it too late in the process to know for sure. Still, it might help in the future if I have to go through all this again.
But for now, Windows 2000 is installing, and I’ve got one Meat Lovers’ and one Hawaiian pizza sitting on my bed calling my name.
Update: Things I learned that I want to record here for future use…
- Special IDE cables are needed to use the ‘cable select’ jumper setting on IDE devices. I don’t have those cables. ‘Cable select’ doesn’t work.
- When two devices are on an IDE bus, the master device should be at the far end of the cable, and the slave device should be at the middle of the cable.
- Windows 2000 (and, presumably, other versions of Windows) needs to write some boot information to the first available drive — usually the master drive on the first IDE bus (drive 0 on bus 0 in my BIOS screen) — even if you’re trying to install Windows on a different drive. It’s best to make sure that you’re installing the OS on that first drive. If you install the OS on a different drive, then when you use fdisk to format the first drive on the first IDE bus, then Windows will fail to boot as you’ve just nuked those boot files. This is a bad thing™.
PC’s are way easier to fix than MAC’s.
When my PC goes down I holler “Rick” real loud about every fifteen minutes and my computer is back up and running in no time.
I think you suffered even worse because you’re used to the Mac. The details that got in your way are second nature to me, but if I had to do your Mac, I’d be gnashing my teeth in no time. I sometimes think strong knowledge of one makes working with other even harder than having little knowledge of either. We expect the “new” one to work somewhat like we’re used to. Thus linear thinking that doesn’t let us “peek around the corner” of the current problem.
To save yourself the hassle in the future, make a disk image of your basic system configuration. If there’s enough space, leave it on your 4 gig drive. (you can make the image before installing all your software to keep the image smaller). This way, if you have to blow off your OS again, you don’t go through the hassle of reinstalling it, you just copy the image back. Don’t forget to point your email storage to the data drive as well!
Paul