Well, my upgraded machine has been yanking my chain all evening. I’d resigned myself to losing the games drive and went to recreate the partition and format it, however XP was having none of it. The remaining 100Gb of my disk thus remains inaccessible, due to what seemed to be inexplicable format errors. Turns out now that there are actually known problems with Maxtor drives and the nforce4 chipset, for which Maxtor have issued a firmware patch, although you have to contact their support to get it. I had thought I’d bought a Western Digital a year or so ago, but turns out it was a Maxtor instead, shows how much I open the case lately.
The other thing that went wrong today was that I decided to try the ‘power on by keyboard’ option on the motherboard, which sounded like a good idea since the power button on the new case is behind an aluminium door. After doing that though, the machine wouldn’t power up. At all. I had to reset the CMOS to get it working again, after having to hunt around to find a spare jumper, since they don’t supply one (‘in case you use it improperly’ - what do they think I’m gonna do with it?) and you have to leave it shorted for 10 minutes to reset properly, a time which I’m not willing to sit there with a screwdriver across the pins for. Once again my friends, gah.
I’m too knackered and stressed to sort out the hard drive firmware now, I need a break. Work has been utterly crazy, I have OGRE work to be getting on with, it’s end-of-year for the company (James, please reply to my mail if you happen to read this) and I really don’t need this crap as well. Time for a cup of tea I think.