The 320G HD for Procyon just got delivered, so now to install it.

UPDATE: I took the cover off where the HD is, and could not figure out how to get the HD to come out. I messed with it for a while, and then gave up. So I packed up the computer and walked over to the repair shop, and offered the guy there $10 to show me how it was done.

It wasn't very hard, and I felt silly once he showed me that the drive had to be slid sideways to come out. Sheesh.

Since I was out anyway, I walked over to Fred's, and was lucky enough to find a copy of Win 7 Home Premium. $120. I got it.

I'm back home again and I've got the new drive in. The restore CD has booted, and right now it's formatting the new drive.

The Win7 package says it has both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Win 7, which of course makes me curious.

The restore should bring me back to the same version of Vista I had, and if so then there really isn't any risk for me in trying to install the 64-bit version of Win 7 to begin with. There's a program I downloaded from Microsoft which checks the hardware to see if it's compatible, and I ran it to see if it would work with 32-bit and it said it would. Once I've got Vista working again, I'll try running it to see if Procyon would be compatible with the 64-bit version, and if so I think that's what I'll install.

If it doesn't work, I'll restore Vista again, and then run the 32-bit upgrade.

UPDATE: The disk formatting program shows me having the new drive, which is going to be 305GB formatted, and my SDHC chip, which is 32G, and something else which is 3.74G formatted as FAT32. I wonder what that is? The flash memory is only supposed to be 1G, so that can't be it.

Anyway, right now that thinks it's the C drive. The new partition is gonna be G. I don't think that's good, so when the format is complete I'm going to reboot the restore CD. Next time, hopefully, the HD will get assigned C:.

But it's gonna be a while. It's only 13% done.

UPDATE: Microsoft allows this upgrade to be used from both XP and Vista, but they've decided to punish XP users. If you upgrade from XP you have to reinstall all your apps.

UPDATE: Big drives are really nice to have, but formatting takes forever! 89% done. Fortunately you only have to do that once.

UPDATE: Finally done formatting. Rather than reboot, I just reassigned the drive letters so that the new drive is C, and now the restore is running. It's estimating 11 minutes to restore something like 60G.

No, 12. No, 13. Now it's 14. Windows time estimates really suck! (There was an XKCD comic about that.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 12:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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