More room please

Having dumped the contents of Paul's iPod onto my PC when he was here in March, and continued to take 3-400 photos of each Chorlton Players' dress rehearsal this year, I found recently I was down to my last 10GB on the 250GB disk that came with this puter.

At around the same time, the appalling performance of this machine (running Windows) finally became too much to bear. Whether it was the dreadful McAfee AV code, which seems to hang everything up while it does its updates, or Firefox, which begins to behave like a dog once you get beyond 8 open tabs, or Windows itself, which regularly goes into a coma doing the simplest of tasks, that represented the final straw I couldn't tell you, but one thing became clear: I couldn't go on like this.

These two threads came together when Nikki found an incredible deal on a Samsung 1TB (terabyte) disk from Microdirect. SATA-2, 7200rpm and a 32MB onboard cache, for barely more than £70 including VAT and carriage. I couldn't resist. The disk arrived shortly after Nikki's folks flew back to Canada and I've been waiting for an opportunity to fit it. Said opportunity finally arose yesterday afternoon, when we arrived home from Chesterfield.

There were a few head-scratching moments. Firstly, from what I'd remembered, Fujitsu-Siemens PCs have a pretty comprehensive wiring loom included - enough to populate the cabinet with as many disks as it is designed to take. I was half right. The loom is IDE-only. Fortunately Annie just happened to have a spare SATA signal cable and power adapter lead in her bottomless bottom drawer. Once I'd collected those I came to the second minor headache.

The FJ disk cradles are a little different to the ones I'm used to, bearing in mind it's more than ten years since I fiddled around inside a PC case. All the hard disks I've fitted in the past have screwed into the baseplate from underneath. This PC has two double-height cradles that are sprung on one side and accept the screws - 3 - through the other side. Once I'd figured that out, the new disk went in just fine.

With the original system disk being SATA, there was only one remaining SATA port on the motherboard, so I'll be in trouble if I need another extension disk. I'll probably have to get hold of a copy of Ghost and clone the original disk onto a new larger unit.

BIOS and Windows recognition of the disk was all automatic (I'd read some forum entries that suggested earlier BIOSs would baulk at large disks, but I haven't had that problem so I must be up-to-date) and once I'd solved the final hurdle (remembering how to partition and format a disk using Windows - it's been so long since I did it that I used fdisk last time!) all was fine.

Formatting the whole disk took a little under 3 hours, and I now have a nice clean 50GB M: (for Mandriva) partition and a 882GB N: (for New data) partition all ready to take my first steps to Linux. After threatening to do it for at least five years, I'm finally going to give it a go. Next stop Mandriva installation! :o)