Hard Drive Story, Or, Insights On Fooling Around With Linux And The Future Of Operating Systems

So, I built my new PC about a month ago. This is the story of this PC, up until now.

The first step to building this new PC occurred in September, actually. Back then I purchased the motherboard I would be building the system around. It was MSI's K8N Neo4 Platinum board. It came recommended from the shsc.info website, a wiki that is run by the members of SomethingAwful's "Serious Hardware / Software Crap" forum.

In October I ordered the rest of the parts. Good stuff. I won't bore you with the rest of the system specs, but just know that it runs all current games very, very nicely. What is important for this post, is the hard drive. The brand is Maxtor. It's a SATA drive, which is like the new standard for connecting your hard drive to your motherboard. It's 300GB.

I have had some problems with this drive. When I first installed Windows, I went to the Event Viewer. It's just a common habit for me. I do this to see if everything went smoothly. The Event Viewer tracks hardware / software errors that have been reported to windows. I didn't expect anything to be there, but there was an error. Paging error on this brand new, gigantic, SATA disk. Oh no! I just wrote it off as a first time starting error thing, like maybe my drive was just trying to get used to this system.

This was not the case. For weeks on end when I booted my PC it was very hit-or-miss. Sometimes it would boot in a reasonable time (1 minute or less), sometimes it would take 5-10 minutes to boot, other times it wouldn't boot into windows at all: it would just hang on the splash screen. The event viewer reflected these boot problems.

Eventually I admitted that this wasn't going to get better, so I formatted the drive. This was a pain in the ass, but of course I transferred all important files to another PC in the house while I reinstalled. I did a complete format, hoping that maybe something was just corrupted.

Things were ok...for a while. Then the same thing started again.

Flash forward to the first or second week of November. On a whim, I upgraded my chipset drivers (the chipset is NForce 4). Things seemed to get better. I was happy. The computer was happy, everyone was happy.

Flash forward to last week. I get a hankering to install Linux. My chosen distro? Ubuntu. I liked Ubuntu a lot because they sent me like 10 free install packages, and I had heard from lots of places that theirs was the distribution to go with at this point in time. I had tried the LiveCD from one of my many install CDs too, and it was rock solid. So I go to install, make Linux partitions, etc...no go. My partition will not resize, for some reason. I'm in the Ubuntu installer, trying to resize. No error message, nothing. I try resizing through Partition Magic. This too, does not work. So once again, the second time in less than a month, I am formatting my brand new drive. The drive partitions perfectly with Windows installed all over again. Hmm. Not sure what is going on at this point. Actually, right now I still don't know why it would not partition. But I installed Linux, which I will get into in a little bit, and I was able to easily choose between Windows and Linux. Of course Windows booted slow as hell. I begun to suspect that there was really something wrong with my hard drive.

I ran Maxtor's PowerMax diagnostic software to see if I could get an RMA number to take advantage of my 3-year warranty on the drive. This took a long time, much longer than I was expecting. Three hours long. The program reported absolutely zero errors on the drive. Did I mention Linux booted fast as lightning, every time, without fail? And Windows, of course did not, it was still a crapshoot.

So, this must be a problem with Windows, right? After posting my problem on the SH/SC forum, someone finally replied with a link to this thread on Nvidia's forums. Hey, how about that! It appears that Maxtor SATA drives, of the exact same kind that I have, and maybe even some other vendors' drives too, have problems with the NForce4 chipset! How about that? And what's a remedy? To upgrade the chipset drivers? Oh, of course. No wonder Windows boots so slow sometimes! No wonder this seemed to go away when I upgraded my chipset drivers! No wonder...I didn't make this connection before? Shit. Anyway, I still get a few of these errors in my event log, but far fewer. And Windows has been starting up just fine. I believe in the near future that this problem will be totally rectified.

Now, on to discussion about Ubuntu Linux.

It has been a long time since I seriously fooled around with Linux. It has come a long way in two years. For the average user it is far easier to navigate, operate, and be productive in a Linux environment. If you are such a user, or any user really, Ubuntu is a great distro to try out, to see if you might like Linux.

When I first booted into Linux, all of my essential hardware was detected immediately right off the bat. I loved it. There is an excellent guide here to getting started with Ubuntu 5.10, and it really helped me get things working the way I wanted them to. One of the first things I did was create a partition separate from my Windows and Linux partitions, a FAT32 type partition, to hold all of my documents, games, music, and other files that I might want to have access to from both operating systems. The reason for FAT32? It is a file system that both operating systems can read / write to. Linux cannot write to an NTFS file system (the system that Windows XP uses), and Windows cannot even read from an ext3 file system, which is used by Linux. So I created this FAT32 partition, and it serves this function, and another: If I need to reinstall either OS, my files are relatively safe from destruction here on this separate partition.

Let me reiterate, this guide is awesome for getting started with Ubuntu Linux.

Now, you ask, why would you want to use Ubuntu Linux? This is why: it is free. Completely free. All of the software is free to download. It can do many of the things that Windows can, and some it can't. In my opinion, the music player amaroK is the COOLEST music player out there on any Operating System. Beats the shit out of iTunes. Hell, it is even cooler than foobar2k in my opinion. I still use and love Foobar on windows though. If you get a new computer in the future and don't want to shell out a few hundred dollars for Windows, I highly recommend you look into Linux as an alternative. With very little work, you can be running a completely legally free operating system that is every bit as functional as Windows.

Another reason to try Linux is to broaden your horizons. It is interesting to see that there's more out there than Windows! There's more than one way to do things, more than one way to organize your files, more than one way to start up an operating system, more than one way to do everything you do right now with windows, and these ways are all perfectly good and right in their own respects. You may even learn that you prefer Linux to Windows. Me, I'm kind of stuck. I like both. If Linux had better gaming support I just might switch. If you look at Windows Vista, the new version of Windows that is supposed to be coming next year, you will see a lot of it is influenced by Apple's Mac OSX. If you look closer, you will see that a lot of it is also influenced by features that are found in the various Linux Desktop Environments. When you get right down to it, all 3 major operating systems appear to be converging on many points. They're all starting to look better, following Apple's example. They cater to both power users and the newbie alike. I believe that in a matter of years, unless someone pulls out some drastic new feature, that it will boil down to a matter of choice. Now many would argue that right now it is a matter of choice, but if you want to play all the best games, you really have to use Windows right now. What I mean by a matter of choice is this: You no longer have to have an intimate knowledge of computers to enjoy the Linux experience.

Each OS does something better than the other right now. The great thing is that many things that are supposedly exclusive to one OS can be emulated on different operating systems. Hell, we are even looking at the possibility of installing OSX on regular old PCs now (I have tried this. It was cool!). With all of the OSes adopting similar hardware now, we're really looking at some interesting convergence points in the future.