One corner of our apartment is a huge ugly jumble of wires and electronic equipment, and I decided to finally clean this up as of course we are moving soon. Of the problems is that I have a very small computer case (a Shuttle), and if I plug two hard drives into it at once I cannot close the case. So as mentioned a while ago I went out and purchased some external USB drive enclosures that I could plug my hard drives into and access them externally. I would of course leave one hard drive inside the box, but then I could close it and have two nice neat external devices next to it which would be much nicer than the pile of electronic crap that looks like it’s about to fall over or electrocute someone.

However, I have utterly failed at this. The problem seems to be with a hard drive of mine that I’ve had lots and lots of trouble with in the past. Some of you may recall a few months ago when I had a drive that scrambled itself when I tried to install windows on it, regardless it’s the same device now that is giving me troubles. My one hard drive worked like a charm, I hooked it up and presto I’ve got working. But not the other one, the problem child of the bunch.

I’m not entirely sure what is wrong with it, the symptoms don’t really make a whole lot of sense. As I implied before, when I try to install Windows onto a partition of the drive it not only refuses to install, but also scrambles the entire disk in a few seconds flat. I’m really not sure how this is even possible, yet I tried and I can actually reproduce this error. Grar! I did finally learn to live with the drive, it works ok as a secondary internal device… but now that I want to close the case to get things cleaned up that doesn’t seem to be a good option.

This is very frustrating, as it’s a decently large hard drive (200G), but it seems that I’m going to have to just throw it away. I’ll replace it with a larger device, but it’s annoying that I can’t use it for something even though it functions under some circumstances. Technology: grumble grumble.

[UPDATE: edited for clarity]