Warning!: Geek Porn. Unless you are a Level 1 Geek Initiate, you may experience drowsiness, deja-vu and confusion. Trying to do the steps below without Geek supervision might result in disassembled computer, lost data and unbootable Windows. Call a geek to put it back.
I have been thinking about getting new hard disk for my computer. It has been running for 2 years and 10 months (powered on) and while this 160GB disk had survived a much younger 500GB hard disk and would probably outlive the 1TB external HDD, I didn’t want to push my luck. I haven’t lost data due to hard disk failure since 2003 and I didn’t want to start now. Moreover, I needed more space for Windows 7 and Ubuntu installation, steam games, pictures that were digitized and the slowly growing “digital photography collection”. In short, I bought a 2TB internal hard disk. For those who care, it is a Western Digital Caveliar Green Model No:
I was thinking that I could just pop the disk in, clone the existing disk and install Ubuntu on the old HDD, but the Windows installation was over 3 years old, probably more than 4 and there were some minor issues that I didn’t want to carry over to the new hard disk. So I disconnected the old hard disk and tried to install Windows 7 on the new one. Unfortunately, 2TB hard disk now appeared to be a 1TB disk. Apparently the Gigabyte motherboard has a bug that causes hard disk above 1TB to show lower size. It is not too difficult to fix and there are different solutions available online. Some day I will write down the steps I tried in case it helps someone.
Finally I got Windows 7 installed, and then I started backing up data from the old HDD, Game saves, random files I had saved on desktop, documents etc. It was much easier than I expected once I realized that trying to preserve my Chrome browsing history and cache would be conclusive proof that I have OCD. Things went smooth from there, install necessary softwares, (I just looked at my program files and downloaded those which I felt I need), latest drivers for the graphics card and that was it. When I did it the last time, I had to backup information from different programs and then restore it.
Thank you cloud!!!
Off came the new hard disk and installed Ubuntu 13.04 on the old hard disk. Why? Because, other than a few games there isn’t much in Windows that I can’t do in Ubuntu. Also, I can find my way around in Windows where as I would have to check man pages or Google to find out how to do things, especially in the terminal. Installing Ubuntu is very easy, anyone can do it. It might take some time to get used to it depending on how much you got used to Windows. Less Windows, easier the transition. The fun starts when you meet the terminal. Advanced user has a different meaning in Linux.
I would say it was a great weekend.
Update: I installed 