April 11, 2003

I’ve been silent for a while now … partially because of reasons that I’ve cited over at SM but also because I’d lost all track of time :p Wow!! I had no idea that it’s been a week since my last post … But I’ve been busy. Even more busier than usual actually :p I started work on this video edit last weekend which kind of grew into a many headed monster like the mythical hydra <g>

When I originally started the edit, I was simply going to splice a few video clips together just to test out the new desktop machine and also to sort of re-familiarize myself with Adobe Premiere. But I had so much fun with the job that I decided to go further. I added music and then wanted a music editing program to do a better job. So I got CoolEdit (but I still haven’t used it actually for reasons that will be made clear as we go on …) Then I wanted to do a title sequence and so I loaded up 3D Studio Max 5.0 since I knew exactly how I wanted to do the title sequence. By this time, my hard disks were groaning since I had only two – a 5GB and a 4GB and I’d already installed a couple of games (Neverwinter Nights and WarCraft III) which had taken a hefty chunk out of the 4GB drive.

By this time, I put off the editing and stuff and had decided to get a new hard disk :p This took a while while I did the necessary research and stuff and along the way, I decided to get a new burner as well since the burner on my Notebook is only 32x4x8 and I could get a Sony 48x24x48 (which could be firmware updated to 52x24x52 if I really needed all that speed) for pretty cheap. The CD-ROM I had on the desktop is an old one and it wouldn’t recognize certain CD’s I’d burnt. So a new CD-ROM really was needed unless I wanted to access all the one’s that wouldn’t work, through the network by putting them in the CD drive on the notebook :p Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I got an 80GB hard disk and the CD burner and then began the whole saga of swapping out the old and putting in the new etc.

I decided to keep my old 5GB drive so that it could serve as a scratch disk for all the vide editing software etc. The 5GB had my XP installation and since I really didn’t feel like doing another installation of XP, I was going to keep XP on it but uninstall and reinstall all the apps to the new hard disk but then I discovered that I couldn’t move the Documents and Settings Folder to the new drive as well since it was a system folder – bummer! I knew that if I left the Documents and Settings folder on the 5GB drive, it probably would fill up pretty soon and be useless as a scratch disk. Plus, I like things neat and orderly anyway and having the OS on one drive and the apps on another somehow grated against my sensibilities – don’t mind me, I’m weird :p So I partitioned my 80GB into two 40GB drives, backed up some of the stuff I wanted into one of the new partitions and started reinstalling XP.

Here comes the bit where I always mess up :p XP, warned me that it couldn’t recognize the partition on the 80GB drive and offered to delete the partition and recreate it and I, not reading what the message said properly, assumed it was talking about *one* of the 40GB partitions, told it to go ahead. I realized a split second after I pressed the ENTER key, that I’d just deleted *both* partitions on the 80GB drive and so had lost my backup data! Ah well … Anyway, the XP installation was faster than ever and took only about 17 minutes :p I spent yesterday reinstalling all my apps and putting in all the new Premiere helper apps and plug-ins and transitions and stuff that I wanted to work with and got my desktop somewhat back to a workable state. I’m still working on that …

Oh yeah, had an interesting problem along the way – I had my documents folder on the original installation set to be accessible only by my login and I couldn’t access it at all after I reinstalled XP ;p Not even after I’d reset the security settings. Fortunately, I had the original installation of XP on the other hard disk and was able to boot into that installation, copy over the contents of the my documents folder and then boot back into the new installation of XP and access the stuff. Makes your head hurt doesn’t it? :p

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Posted by Fahim at 6:28 am  |  1 Comment