i snagged a downloadable copy of instant cake and swung out to microcenter to grab a couple of 200G hdds (i actually bought three, which turns out to have been handy, figuring i'd put the third as extra storage in my desktop windows box). after a whole bunch of confusion involving a phone call to poor meltingly hot kathrynt in the blast furnace of the burning hand and some scratching of my head and the structural failure of my liquor cabinet, i managed to get the pc to boot the instant cake cd from the primary slave slot as required. then i generated a pair of hard drives for the tivo. *and* i found my torx bits.
trick with booting the instant cake cd: i have two optical drives on my pc (one cd-rw, the other dvd (read-only)). i disconnected my regular hdd so there was no risk of it getting savaged by the stark fist of instant cake. it seems that if you have two optical drives on a single ide chain, my pc will only recognize boot media in the master device. if it's in the slave, it fails to see it. so i put the third hdd in the master slot and it found the boot media on the slave just fine. (the other ide channel was set up with the to-be-tivo hdd's.)
i'm about to wander upstairs and drop the new drives into the tivo to see if new drives make it happy.
so, to pull either of the tower machines out of where they are, i have to move the cabinet that i use as a liquor cabinet. unfortunately, this time, the cabinet failed under the weight of the booze in it. so now i have a broken cabinet and approximately 40 bottles of everything from cheap tequila to assorted liquors to expensive scotch set up on the floor, here. i think this is my clue that i should be drinking more of the booze so as to provide relief to the poor cabinet.
i haven't had a chance to do a careful inspection to see if it's going to be reasonably fixable or not. if not, well, it was free.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 04:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 03:05 am (UTC)That's my kind of party. I'll bring the bellydance.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 04:12 am (UTC)