Hardware Woes
I swear I’ve got some supernatural effect on computer hardware that causes it to want to make things as difficult as possible for me.
Since we upgraded to digital cable, our PVR box has been sitting unloved and unused in the spare bedroom because we don’t really have the space or the inclination to set it up as a second computer. Today I decided I’d scrounge the 250gb hard drive out of it and turn it into a handy external USB drive with a Dynex enclosure from Best Buy. Four hours later, I’ve mounted it as an internal drive and the enclosure is going back to the store.
I’m still at a complete loss as to what the problem could be, save a fault enclosure. My machine would occasionally detect that the drive had been plugged in but then fail to initialize the USB Mass Storage driver with a “Device could not start (Code 10)” error. The intertron had lots of helpful advice from 2005 suggesting that maybe my USB ports weren’t providing enough power but since a) I’m pretty sure my machine is up to snuff and b) the enclosure comes with an external power source I don’t think that was the problem. Cressa’s Mac didn’t want to recognize it either, so I think I ruled out any problem specific to my machine.
It’s also entirely possible that I did something wrong hooking the drive up to the enclosure, but here I can only blame the included instructions. Dynex’s “manual” wants the process to appear as simple as it should be (hook up drive, plug into computer, format drive, use) but leaves out some details that might come in handy if you run into any trouble. Knowing whether the drive should be set to “master” or “slave” would have been nice; any sort of troubleshooting advice would have been divine (their website isn’t any help either, having only a PDF version of the unhelpful manual).
Anyway, the trip to Best Buy wasn’t a complete waste. I did get season one of Venture Bros. and Shaun of the Dead for cheap.