I changed the plan slightly. Having managed to find a trustworthy answer directly from Microsoft on how I can adjust a HDD partition, I decided to de-partition the old HDD after format.
Voila! Now I have 2 500GB drives.
Formatting a HDD was surprisingly quick when you pick "Quick Format". Apparently the difference between the normal Format and Quick Format is that Quick skips the part of the process in which it scans for bad sectors and repairs them.
This is completely unnecessary as I had already done this multiple times back when I was trying to repair my old comp.
After that, all I needed to do was go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management. The rest is obvious once you're there. One warning: make sure all data on that disk or partition(s) is/are expendable.
So I formatted both partitions of the old HDD and deleted both partitions before creating a single volume out of the empty space on that disk.
Furthermore, I now have all the drivers and Windows installed on the Black HDD and currently copying the backup files that I had brought from the Black to the Blue... back to the Black. After that, I'm formatting the Blue before returning the backup files to the clean Blue HDD again.
I did consider just deleting everything but those backup files but I'm not sure if it is going to be clean enough that way. This is going to take 3 hours more but it will give me peace of mind.
So English is actually a very abstract language. Linguistically it's called a "synthetic language". Essentially such a language often makes use of inflections (suffix, prefix, etc) to create different yet related meanings. In contrast, Chinese is an "analytic language" which uses additional words to do the same.
For example, in Chinese there are only 4 ways to create a term that expresses an abstract idea: 德,道,品,性. Can't say these are suffixes because they are separate words after all, but they are used in a similar way.
As for English, there are lots of ways to do the same, like "honesty", "abstraction", "civility", "magnanimous" and etc. There's such a long list of suffixes and prefixes, it's a pain to remember them all. Hence it's so hard to write well even if you rarely encounter words you don't understand.
Not saying writing in Chinese is any easier though.
Just went for the first lesson on Chinese Reading and Comprehension. It's like the English literature class I took on essays and short fiction, except this is in Chinese and deals with Chinese essays.
I'm so dead once you take into account the fact that a good reader needs to read a lot in order to understand essays well. Often there is a need to understand the background of the writer and the other literary works of his/her era in order to better appreciate an essay.
Chinese essays aren't the only things this course is about. I also have to read short stories, formal letters, news articles and stuff.
Even though all my exams this semester are going to be open book, I'm not seeing any reason why it's going to be easier.
Hmm.. so I can't just format the Blue HDD, possibly because it also has an OS. So I'm now trying to delete/disable the OS on that disk by going to msconfig, Boot tab and "Delete" the non-"Current" OS. Let's see if this works after the restart...
Nope, still tells me that "Windows cannot format the system partition on this disk."
Now switching the positions of the HDDs in the casing and then their cables to make the Caviar Black Disk 0 and the Blue into Disk 1. Maybe this will make the Black HDD the "System" HDD.
Damn.
"BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart"
Looks like I'm seriously stuck with the Blue as my OS HDD.
YES! Another obstacle down! Using the Windows Repair Console by booting from the Vista DVD, I was able to use "System Repair" to make a new boot manager on the Black HDD.
Now... back to the original task of formatting the Blue HDD.
Formatted! Now transferring all the backup files to the Blue HDD and I'm back to the normal routine of installing games and customizing my desktop.
I bet these posts are going to be important to me someday.
All that fixing took half a day. Started this at 10.30am, went about the tasks at a leisurely pace and finally finished transferring everything at 4.30pm. Six whole hours right there. So if you're doing some serious PC fixing like I did, better make sure you have at least half the day free.
This casing is seriously quiet. Or maybe my HDD is having some problems.
Now that I'm using the Caviar Black HDD mostly, it's been clicking a lot audibly. I never heard it before in the old PC so this is going to take some getting used to. According to WD, this clicking is normal.
Even the Blue doesn't click this loudly. In fact, it's not even audible almost all the time.
As far as I can tell, Caviar Green is supposed to be even quieter.
Despite this knowledge that the clicking is normal, it is a little disturbing when you're used to the fact the audible clicking in other HDDs are almost always bad news.
This headline is so... obvious. I didn't know Captain Obvious works for the IMF. Food prices has always been and will always be one of the most significant contributors to civil unrest. All human beings share the same basic priorities from our millennia of evolution and food only ranks after air and water.
Until we hit a second Green Revolution, this present global tension we're witnessing will only increase.
If insects and artificial meat are the solutions to world hunger, at least they're better than lead.
For some strange inexplicable reasons I suddenly have this urge to go for a packaged tour to the DPRK. The available departure dates for this year are 8/4, 15/4, 29/4, 13/5, 27/5, 3/6, 10/6 , so I'm thinking 3rd or 10th June are possible dates.
Only 10-day tours are available, 4 days of which are actually spent travelling between Singapore and Shenyang and the DPRK. Unfortunately it's also going to cost each person about S$2300 inclusive of taxes and stuff. Another thing is that Air Koryo (DPRK airline) is one of the worst airlines in the world although they've only had 1 fatal accident so far (and it was in Africa).
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