The new drive (and video card) came today; but without data or power cables, causing me to make a trip down to College street to pick up the power cable (Ken had found a data cable after ordering one yesterday). So much for paying to get the drive delivered to avoid impinging on work-time. To add insult to annoyance I just assumed I still had some regular "Y" power connectors. Nope, apparently I put my last one into someone's machine... which means I have no CD-R or DVD until I get one.

When I hooked the drive up to the motherboard something got seriously karked in the BIOS (It's a Soyo Dragon motherboard). After an hour or two of cursing and trying every key combination and drive combination I could think of I just lay down in frustration and left the dratted thing stuck at the BIOS splash-screen. 10 minutes later whatever it was trying to do finally timed out and it booted (much to my surprise). So far nothing has made a difference to that 10 minute delay/pause on reboot. I'm considering flashing the BIOS, but I may leave it for now (I seldom reboot the box, and it's a 10 minutes to sit and contemplate).

I went with a Stage 3 + GRP installation, which basically consists of un-tarring a stage-file, setting up a few config files, chrooting into the new system then telling it to install whatever binary packages you want (KDE, FireFox, Thunderbird, that kind of thing). I'll likely rebuild them incrementally once the new instance is running, but this should get me to a functional 2005.1 install that I can use to work while it's doing the rebuilding.

I could just go ahead and do the rest of the building while in the old instance, but I'm hesitant to invest too much in the new environment before I know it will become a valid, bootable instance.

For now I'm leaving my GRUB install on the older first hard disk with just a pointer to the new install. Hopefully everything will be happy with that arrangement. Probably reboot in an hour or two when I'm done the day's work and see.

Anyway, just struck me that it's really cool that you can build a new instance of the machine while you're still running the old instance. Not cool in a Zaphrod way, but cool nonetheless.