Gotcha again!
Tech December 9th. 2009, 10:31pmHere I was, systematically backing up all my files for the past week with my ultra-slow external USB drive. This is because a few weeks ago my regular DVD drive died and I needed to pick a replacement. I bought a USB drive because it was potentially portable. If I ever bought a notebook that lacked a DVD drive because it was ultra thin and needed to install something that still came on a physical drive, I could potentially use my external DVD drive to make it happen. I thought that if I needed a DVD it might be handy to keep around, especially if I ever wanted to reinstall an operating system. Despite the DVD writing at x 0.4x speed I wasn’t annoyed because I’d eventually be able to get to installing something new.
It turns out though that you are up a creek if you want to boot from an external USB drive at start up. I forgot to realize that the drivers to control a USB DVD drive aren’t going to be in most BIOS settings that look for bootable things when you start your computer. My internal DVD drive was bootable before, but now that is an external USB device, it only works when the Operating System is working. The operating system I want to replace isn’t going to let me to continue to run the device while I wipe it from my machine and run something on top of it. I need the operating system running to erase and install a new operating system. PARADOX.
Now I have a slow external drive that can’t be used to install any new operating system at all, and no current solution to my problem. I’ve actually got to go to the store and buy a USB stick and make it bootable with the image of the OS I am attempting to install to solve this problem unless I want to buy a second internal DVD drive. Even then, there are twenty steps just to make this work-around succeed. If I am lucky I’ll be able to boot from my USB stick, assuming I don’t need to update my BIOS on my Motherboard, which takes a few dozen steps itself.
Just when I thought I was ready to get something done, I have to do twenty more things just to do something simple. I know I can do what I need to myself to get it all accomplished as quickly as possible, but it’s so damn annoying to have to deal with all this. I hate computers SO much sometimes.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
