Geeking Out

I've always been a nerd. I love Star Trek and Star Wars and used to play Magic: The Gathering. I started programming in qBasic before I was 10. The last few days have been particularly nerdy. Let me tell you why.

I brushed up on my CSS, reviewed the basics of AJAX, and read a few chapters of a book on Drupal.

I spent hours trying to get a server (Dell PowerEdge SC420) working. It had Fedora Core installed with a program called Fonality, and I had to get Fedora Core off. I wanted to put Windows Server 2003 on, but I don't have the ISO anymore. Maybe I can contact MS and tell them my product key and have them mail it to me. Anyhow, I put in the XP boot disk because all I want is a WAMP stack on it, and I can do that with XP.

Installing XP is not a complicated process - you put in the CD and it installs. Except this time, it wouldn't. It would boot from CD, scan the computer, then freeze. I did a ton of research and found that since I don't know how to use Grub at all, the easiest way to get Fedora Core off and Windows on would be to use the hard drive Utility Disk. It's a Western Digital drive, so I went to their site. Unfortunately, they have tons of different utility disks and they're all poorly labeled. I took a stab at it and downloaded the DOS ISO. I then burned it and threw it in the server.

It worked perfectly (except that it wouldn't always tab to all the options). I was then able to install XP without any problems. After the install, I noticed that several of the drivers, including the ethernet card drivers, were missing. I went to the Dell website from my laptop, downloaded them, and put them on the server. But they wouldn't install with XP - only Server 2003. Frustrating!

By then I was sick of the server. Between work all day and my geek play at night, I'd been staring at screens for hours and my eyes were getting bloodshot. I returned the borrowed monitor I used for the server to my roommate Mark, and somehow he mentioned that he had an old laptop he no longer needed. My ears perked up.

We credit-carded Nishan's door and got Mark's old laptop from his room. The stipulation was that I wipe the drive completely before use. I downloaded Eraser and started to wipe it. I let it run, although it kept on prompting me for input, which was annoying. I let it run all night.

When I woke up in the morning it had made little progress. I realized that it was set to write over the drive 35 times (for added safety). I attempted to change that default setting, but couldn't figure out how in the documentation. So I did what anyone would do - I got a different program.

I chose Darik's Boot and Nuke. It's simple and boots from a CD. It does exactly what it says it does - erases everything on a drive. In under 2 hours, it was done. I threw in another old drive to erase as well (drive 3 is 84.58% done as I'm writing this). I also decided it would be a good idea to back up my personal laptop, so I pulled out my 500gb LaCie FaPorsche external hard drive and started the backup.

Then I went to a lecture on cloud computing. It was fabulous. :)