Uechi-Ryu.com

To those karatekas with a new PC in their near future:

Just a note of interest to those considering purchasing a new PC with humungous hard drives and installing NT. NT does NOT support the new jumbo hard drives while 98's fat32 does (even though 98 is lowly DOS with a pretty face and not an operating system it pulled one over on NT this time). There is a patch to service pack 3 (not service pack three, but a patch to it) that corrects this microsoft bug. Although they (MS) claimed support for really big disks, at the time of the claim there were no disks in the world over 10Gb in which to test -- ...and that is about when things go awry.

This is an NT feature known by few and FYI for you.

Allen

Right! Let me tighten the screws on my previous FYI a little to eliminate ambiguity and misunderstanding... No Monsta EIDE drives, which are the common denominator of most livingroom systems, have not arrived on the scene until recently. Those drives are what I was referring to because SCSI, although superior to EIDE, is not even in the dreams of most considering new PCs. They usually select the common, less expensive, EIDE route with DOS as the default operating system shipped.

Now those who install NT over that ancient out-of-environment-space kluge on their new PC should be aware of this little-known caveat. Just spreading a little info from the School of Hard Knocks to help others avoid the same pitfalls.

Allen

Well, Anthony, the saga isn't over yet....

In the door comes a free NT operating system plus a nice CD to restore the HD to original factory tip-top shape and the ^%(*&!@ #@$$#^%# fails to load properly. Twice! (Laughing yet?)

Ok. I ran out of patience two weeks ago. NOW it is time to roll up my sleeves and get mean with machine so's I dust-off my ancient knowledge of the hated 'debug', type in a few lines of assembly language and blow away all the partitions. That straightened out that and NOW the disk is factory fresh and correctly partitioned for NTFS.

Gonna work now, ain't no bouts a doubt it...

This is when it gets to me, everything s/b perfect but guess what doesn't load. NT!

Starting to think of that that little mpeg I posted here, the one that launched a CRT from his cubicle. Remember that one?

I have a house full of Winchester hard drives, both SCSIs and IDEs, and have never had a problem with any of them (even dropped one once, and it kept on ticking.).

Everytime a Maxtor comes in the house it maxtorques and flails. Every one of 'em, honest to God. Just in case you might not have fingered it out by now, guess what the label on the drive that came with the new pc read? But its a secret, so you can remain in deep suspenders. There must be something about the geoposition of this place and the magnetic flux density surrounding this area.

Right now I am working 10-12 hour days with a 3-hour commute so I have neither the patience nor the time nor the desire to fool around, therefore I called the salesman and raised holy hell -- because he was told me it was going to be an IBM drive when I placed the order. boy did I get results, like a super-deep discount on the original purchase, a new drive on it's way, and other free stuff.

So you though I did some serious hair pulling eh? It wan't my hair that I pulled.....

Allen

A hundred bucks well spent. I have on-site service too. The machine came with Win98 and I loaded NT over it. So what if they don't support software which does not come with the machine. Now the hardware is down and they must support that. So a new disk is arriving with NT and all the other goodies on it. My salesman is no longer there so I handled the issue directly.

I did NOT have to work the problem through and had the option of requesting another disk int the beginning but elected to take the learning path for experience sake and glad I did. Often when I go to a new site the PC given to me to use, if I don't use my own, is really messed up and needs to be redone over. I'm supposed to be the 'expert' from day one so if I get stuck there is often no one else to call.

Such is life in the big city!

Allen

Hey! HEY!!!

Heh, Heh!

Talk 'bout on-site service.... For two days there has been a call on my answering machine to find out when 'they' could come here and install a new hard disk at my convenience, placed the morning after I caved-in on the Mintor Monstor problem.

Allen