Well, the replacement hard drives arrived yesterday while I was at lunch. When I got home from work, the first thing I did was go into the office and try to get the hard drives into the case. (One of them didn’t like going into the slot previously occupied by the Zip drive, but it got in there eventually.) As soon as the drives were in, I hooked the machine up to the KVM switch my servers use for testing. Sure enough, both hard drives were detected properly. So, with that, I took the machine into my room, hooked up all the peripherals, and started the real work. I got the two drives into a RAID 0 configuration (making it appear as a gigantic 640 GB drive), and began installing Windows XP Professional on it.
By the time I was ready to go to bed, the system was fully up and running and ready to go. About the only three applications I have left to install on it are the GIMP, Winamp, and OpenOffice.org. The only real hiccups I encountered were that the nVIDIA Firewall was corrupting downloads (so I had to disable it and switch back to Windows Firewall) and MS’s IntelliPoint software no longer supports the Intellimouse Explorer I use. I’m pondering getting a new mouse anyway, so the mouse issue is really a non-issue. As for the firewall… apparently in the week since I copied the nVIDIA nForce drivers to my USB flash drive, nVIDIA updated the drivers. I might give it another try tonight.
In any event, the main PC is back up and running, and is actually faster than it was before. I should be a happy camper. :-) Tonight will be spent installing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Quake 4, and seeing how well they run on the new hardware.
And now, I have work stuff to deal with. Fun fun…