New Hardware and You

So my new computer hardware ended up being a huge pain to install. But not for the normal reasons... in this case, it was because I forgot my DVD drive was an IDE device.

Most new motherboards are leaving off IDE controllers. Those are the things that tell your PC how to read older hard drivers. Modern drives are all SATA, and while I was prepared to lose control of one of my hard drives, losing the DVD drive was an unforeseen issue.

To top that off, I had my computer set up to dual boot either into Visa (on one drive) or into Windows 7 (on another). But the way I had it set up, I needed a bootable disk in the DVD drive. Once I got all the new hardware in, and I powered up my PC, I had no boot disk... and no DVD drive to install one from. I was in a bit of a bind.

So I needed to build a bootable USB stick with Windows 7 on it. I downloaded the tool from the microsoft site, but it required a ISO (exact copy) file of a windows disc, and all the mirrors were predicting one hour download times. I tried using Wendy's computer to rip my existing disks, but the tool had didn't recognize them. I didn't figure out till the one hour download had completed that the problem was with the microsoft tool, not the ISO. It wouldn't recognize any of the ISOs I fed it.

To add insult to injury, it told me I needed a 4 gig memory stick. I fed it one, it said it couldn't use it, so I reformatted it. It still didn't like it, so I put in another with a different file system. It didn't like it, so I reformatted it, it didn't like it either. So I ended up purging three memory sticks of their information before I figured out the tool was busted.

I ended up using this site to create my stick and it worked perfectly:
http://johnpapa.net/BootFromUSB

But then I realized it didn't install any of the drivers for my network devices. This meant I needed to copy over drivers... so I copied over the entire driver disk that came with my motherboard (another 40 minutes). When I installed all that, the stupid motherboard company decided I needed a wide array of preposterous utliities that faked improving my computer, so I spent 30 minutes cleaning all that up.

But now, my computer is running... my computer is running fast... and my computer is relatively clean of unnecessary digital junk. Now to install my old mobo/processor into Wendy's computer.