But what does it all mean?

I dreamt about work last night.  For some reason I'd been displaced from my current office job  (too much time in LJ perhaps?) and I was assigned to a position out in the field in some unspecified capacity.  I met my new boss, who insisted on outlining some basic safety tips for working in the field.  He didn't seem to care when I informed him that I'd been with the company for 17+ years, and that some of the time had been spent working in the field, so I had a pretty good working knowledge of safety procedures.  What's worse is that he concentrated on things that were patently obvious.  Thank you, yes, I know how to tie my boot laces so that I won't trip over them.  After explaining a few more equally obvious things he said, "I guess you're up to snuff on the safety side of things.  Now get to work." and he walked away.

The problem was that I had no idea where I was supposed to report to work, nor what I was supposed to be doing when I got there!  All I knew was that I was wearing dressy Rockports, and I was supposed to be in steel-toes if I was going to be working there.  I started wandering toward my car in order to change off, when it occurred to me that I had no idea where I'd parked.  I spent the next hour in the dream trying to locate it (Dude, where's my car?).  Eventually I found it and traded off my footwear, but I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that my new boss would be less-than-impressed over the fact that I'd just disappeared for a whole hour at the start of my first shift with him.  Fortunately the air conditioner woke me up before I found out, and when I went back to sleep I dreamt about something else.

!

What should have been a simple chore turned into a whole evening of frustration.  All I wanted to do was swap out the stupid P.O.S. IBM drive in my computer with a much more reliable Western Digital drive.  While I was in there I decided to do some long-planned rewiring.  I admit that the first blunder was of my own doing.

I pulled out all of the drives (two hard drives, a CDRW and a DVD) and set their jumpers for Cable Select.  I blew the dust out of the system, grabbed 4-UDMA100 cables and wired them up as follows: 80G Seagate to IDE 1, 13.7G Western Digital to IDE 2, CDRW to IDE 3 and DVD to IDE 4.  I powered back up, jumped into the BIOS and enabled the RAID controllers (IDE 3 and 4).  On reboot the BIOS cycled through all four drives, clearly seeing and identifying each one.

Everything's groovy!

Windows did The Funky Chicken when it came up, doing it's whole "OMGWTF teh n3w w2r3z!!!" bit while it detected the changes I'd made to the hardware configuration.  After many requesters and thrashing of the hard drive, it announced that it had found some generic RAID device that it couldn't identify, and some kind of "mass storage device" that it could make neither heads nor tails of.  I checked in the "My Computer" folder to confirm that it was talking about my CD and DVD drives.  Bugger.  It must have lost the proper drivers for the RAID when I upgraded to SP2.

I went to the ABIT site and downloaded the latest Highpoint and VIA drivers for my motherboard.  Windows swallowed down the first driver without a complaint, but when I tried to install the second one it was all like "That driver is so yesterday.  You're not going to try and make me use it, are you?"  And I'm all like, "Whatever bitch, just take it and shut up."  And it's all like, "Whatever, but don't blame me if I stop working."  And I'm all like, "Whatever.  You always say that."

This time it was serious.

I rebooted, and it came back up into a BSOD.  Grrr.  I guess I should have listened to it when it complained about the IDE driver.  Windows does not like it when you mess with IDE drivers.  Anyone who has ever taken a boot drive formatted in one machine and dropped it into another will know about that.  Fortunately I'd created a bootable XP install disk with SP2 slipstreamed into it just a couple of days prior.  I jumped into the BIOS and changed around the boot order so that the first device it would try would be teh RAID device.  The machine calmly went through listing all of my drives and devices on boot up, then skipped right past teh RAID device and booted me back into a BSOD.  OMGWTFBBQ?!  I tightened the thumb screws a bit and told it, "Attention BIOS, as of right now there is no other bootable device other than teh RAID device."

The machine rebooted.  It detected all of my mass storage devices, meditated on the futility of existence for awhile, and then prompted me for a boot disk.  Suddenly the distant words of wisdom from a co-worker came floating back to me from across the ages.  "... and remember not to plug your DVD or CD drives into the RAID controller, not that I think you'd be dumb enough to try that."  D'oh!  Shitshitshitshit!  That's right, the hard drives are supposed to go into IDE 3 and 4, and the other devices go into 1 and 2.  Sheepishly I juggled the cables around, reset the boot order in BIOS and rebooted.  The computer pondered on the great mysteries for awhile, announced that it had found a whole scad of mass storage devices plugged into my system, and then said that it NTLoader was missing, or that it needed a boot disk, or something lame like that.  Ah well, missing NTLoader was something that I could deal with.

I juggled the boot order again, plugged in the new, slipstreamed install CD and rebooted.  It gronked and ground and loaded up all of its install stuff.  I had my finger poised over the R key to do a repair, when the Windows installer said, "OMG, like you don't even have a hard drive.  How am I supposed to, like, install if you don't have a hard drive?"  Bugger!  It appears that Windows no longer recognizes my RAID controller.  I don't know if this is a Windows thing, or a hardware problem on my machine.  A friend who has the same motherboard is running off his RAID controller, so I'm thinking the problem is likely localized to my machine.  Gah.  I'm not too surprised if it's a hardware problem.  My Centronics port has been hooped for awhile now too.  Time for an upgrade, methinks.

I eventually found a combination that worked and did a repair install, though it screwed up my sound drivers and rendered my system mute.  I downloaded the new audio and video drivers again, and by the end of this evening I should at least have my machine back up and running at the same level as it was before I started this whole messy process.

Finally

I did a bit more work on the computer this evening.  I got the sound card working again, and discovered that Windows did not over-write the newer video drivers, so I don't need to reinstall those.  I forced through the RAID drivers again, ignoring Windows protests that it would turn into a pumpkin if I installed them, and this time they worked and I can see the HD on the RAID controller now. Huzzah.  I had a hunch that it wasn't those drivers that killed Windows the first time, and I was right.  On the other hand I'd set aside a block of time to repair XP again if needed.  Perhaps I'll use that time to write haiku.

Gah

I spoke prophetic words this morning.  Earlier today the_gneech posted about how his dad had taken a spill and broken his hip.  In my response I said, "[sigh] My own parents are getting up to the age where I am starting to worry about things like that (dad's pushing 80)."

I just learned tonight mom took a spill off the step ladder and broke her collar bone.  =(

Apparently this happened on Saturday, and I'm just the last one to find out.  I'm somewhat mortified, because this is how I found out (changed her user name here):

[21:33] [plonq's mom]: his lapyop has gone to Toronto for maintenance
[21:34] [plonq's mom]: uh laptop
[21:34] Plonq: I'm in the market for a new computer as well, but I'm taking my time and shopping around.  The prices are really dropping just now, so I don't want to jump in too quick.  I figure if I wait a month or two I can get much more machine for the same price as I'd pay now.
[21:34] Plonq: Heh.  I didn't even catch the misspelling until you pointed it out.
[21:35] [plonq's mom]: i'm typing with only ome hand and don't know where the letters are that way
[21:36] Plonq: Typing with one hand again?  Are you eating while you type, or did you do something to your other hand?
[21:37] [plonq's mom]: i broke my left collar bone on Saturday

Urgh.