New Hard Drive

Finally got my new hard drive. A Western Digital Caviar Green WD20Ears (or something like that). It's a 2.0tb SATA which means I can kill the ide/sata hybrid mode.

It's an advanced format drive which uses 4k sectors (4096). I went ahead and set it up with gpt so that I have something else to play with and can get rid of that annoying extended partition which drives me nuts...

The drive isn't the fastest but I chose it primarily for size, WD reliability, power consumption and perhaps most importantly quietness. It is a very quiet drive. Even with the chassis open while I run diagnostics on it, you can't hear it spin up. So, mission accomplished.

So now back to installing everything. I have a xbmc-live production part, an xbmc-live dev part, an Ubuntu 10.10 part and a couple more parts for some other distros I want to play with.

I used gpartedlive which is a live Linux distro that primarily runs a graphical gparted. Really convenient. With gpt drives, grub isn't installed on the MBR because there is no MBR so a small 34mb partition is set up at the root of the drive and set to GRUB_BIOS. Then a boot partition can be set up for the grub files. It actually works pretty well so far. I want to explore some of Grub2's more advanced features like its ability to load an iso image.

I've gotten xbmc-live setup and now have enough room to play with more of the features. So I'm setting up a few game emulators (znes, mame etc) and putting a shit ton of old games on it. Znes and mame are both working via the launcher and advanced launcher plugins for xbmc. I'm going to go ahead an build mame from source because many of my roms don't work with the version that Ubuntu 10.04 installs.

In addition to the hard drive, I also went ahead and picked up a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card. That's right, old school and cheap. The onboard sound on my Fuzzy apparently has a bad jack. I don't fell like trying to resolder a new jack complex on it so I'm going ahead and making use of the 1 pci slot on the board. The next board I get will have 4 SATA ports, a PCI-Express and a couple of PCI so I'll have to go a bit bigger than a micro-atx. I'll retool the micro-itx board for a client computer at a later date.

Sandisk Cruzer Pen Drive Wouldn't Format In Windows Vista

I decided to try out xbmcfreak-live on a usb pen drive. I'd previously installed Puppy Linux on the pen drive and it was formatted with ext3. Well, Windows Vista had a hissy fit when I went to format it. Kept getting an error that the media was write protected. So I booted up gparted live, selected the pen drive under device and formatted it to fat32. Problem solved.

Gparted live should be in everyone's toolkit:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php