Date: Thu, 16 Oct 97 08:02:04 -0800
From: EvangeList <evangelist@apple.com>
Subject: Tidbit - How I Spent My Weekend -  Installing a Hard Drive

Keyword: Advocacy, Windows Daymares

This tidbit is from:

Johnmichael P.M. Monteith

I ran out of hard drive space on my WinTel machine on Friday, and decided 
it was time to had another hard drive. It is now Sunday evening. I now 
finally have it installed.

Problem 1: How to install a third hard drive. I already have two hard 
drives in the system. If you know about EIDE interfaces, I am certain you 
have heard how it is possible to install more than two IDE devices. Well, 
that is if your second IDE interface card can handle hard drives. Most 
manufacturers put a high speed EIDE interface for two hard drives, and a 
slow EIDE interface for CDROM and tape drives. Such is the case in my 
machine. Therefore, hooking up the hard drive to the second card would 
not be wise.

The result? Get rid of one of the smaller hard drives, and keep to only 
two. (Those of you with more than 2 SCSI devices should take pride that 
you bought the right computer in your Mac.) That translates to a loss of 
a gigabyte, or about $100.00. But, hey, who's counting?

Problem 2: Moving data from old hard drive to new one. Since I can not 
have more than two hard drives hooked up to the system at the same time, 
how can I copy the data from the hard drive I do not want to the hard 
drive I do? Hook them both up, boot from a Windows 95 startup floppy, and 
copy the files. Easy, right? First, the system disk did not include XCOPY 
(the regular copy command will not copy directories and subdirectories). 
So, I re-hooked up the old hard drive, copied the files, re-hooked up the 
new hard drive, booted off of the floppy ... you can see where this is 
going.

Ever been in a 'discussion' with a Windows 95 user trying to explain to 
them that underneath Windows 95, DOS is sitting there? They will tell you 
that the DOS is actually just a part of Windows 95, and not the opposite. 
Well, if that were true, and if I made a Windows 95 boot disk, you would 
expect it to support long file names, wouldn't you? Guess again. Instead, 
when the floppy boots up and says "Windows 95" (when it usually would say 
"MSDOS 6"), you get the same old problems that were around in all of the 
previous DOS versions, including the 8 character filename limit.

But, I digress. I attempted to copy all of my files from one hard drive 
to the other because I can only have two hard drives. Can you guess what 
happened to my files? All of the extended file names gut truncated down 
to 8 characters, and suddenly none of the applications worked because 
they could not find the file names they were looking for.

Problem 3: How to get the extended file names copied on to the new hard 
drive. Okay, I'll skip to how I solved the problem rather than the 
painful road I traveled to find the solution: Get another WinTel machine. 
Install LapLink on both. LapLink the hard drive (800 megabytes of hard 
drive data) from the old hard drive to the new one. In case you get the 
urge, this will pretty much take up your day.

But, hey, I did it! My Mac never gives me this enormous feeling of 
accomplishment after installing a new SCSI drive. I feel like I just won 
a gold at the Olympics. If I installed a hard drive on a Mac, I would 
have been bored all weekend long. Or perhaps, I might have actually 
gotten some work done.