Needs Zombies

Every Story is better with zombies.

Ever had a day where you're trying to accomplish something, lots of things go wrong, yet because of something unexpected, things turn out all right in the end?

This was the case with a little project I helped someone out with. He had a laptop with 'Net access, and it was equipped with the one - the only - Windows Millennium Edition OS. First off, he was getting *lots* of lock-ups, and very slow performance to boot. I examined his system a bit, and found not only that it had only 96 MB of RAM, but also had between 250 and 280 MB of harddisk space left. The OS claimed that the harddisk was actually a 1.5 GB harddrive. The owner said he'd do a lot to get the machine to stop locking up on him, even if it meant losing all his data and starting from scratch with the thing.

I said I had a laptop at home with a larger harddisk (6 GB to be exact), and I could find the drivers his laptop used (video drivers and all) so he could run the 'Net using my bigger harddisk, and the lockups would end.

Step one - Found all three sets of drivers: Sound, Video, and Ethernet cards. Even fit on a 3.5 floppy, so I didn't have to waste any CD-Rs. Excellent! Step two - Take the harddisk from my old laptop and stick it in my friend's laptop. Problems arise; I found I'd removed the harddisk from my laptop many months ago, and couldn't remember where I put the darn thing. :-/

So, I tore apart another old laptop I had to get its harddisk. Get this - It was 1.2 GB. Dang!

I was like "You know what? I'm just gonna re-format the harddisk this guy already has, and maybe there'll be enough disk space so it won't lock up."

So, I remove all harddrive partitions, put a primary harddisk partition in, and guess what? It claims the harddisk is now 4 GB in size. Okay, I must've done something wrong. I remove the partition, re-partition it again, and get the same thing. Oooookay. Let's play along with this and see what happens. I re-format the harddrive. No problems. Install Win98 SE. No problems. Install the drivers. For the most past, the drivers I downloaded aren't even needed, because Win98 SE is newer than the actual drivers the laptop uses. Now, I install everything I promised, and I still have over 3 GB of harddisk space left. This is cool!

I think what happened is that the laptop originally had Windows 95 installed, which has a FAT16 system. Then, instead of re-partitioning the harddrive before installing Windows ME, the previous owner had installed Windows ME on top of Win95. As a result, the harddisk had 2.5 GB of space locked out thanks to WinME. Removing the partition and re-formatting the harddrive solved the disk space problem.

Pretty eventful day. While things obviously didn't go as planned, I'm glad this experience at least had a happy ending. :-)

- Tricob.