After 1.5 days of installation marathon, I’m almost done setting up my new computer. At first, there were a few problems again after I had moved all SATA hard drives into the Dell and when I was trying to install Windows Server 2003: a nice BSOD right after the text phase of the installation. I think it was the same issue [1] as 1.5 years ago. But this time, I had a slipstreamed CD of Windows Server 2003 ready that included SATA drivers and Service Pack 2.
After that, it has been a pretty smooth ride. One small moment of panic arose when I tried to access my password-protected sensitive data: Somehow, it wouldn’t let me access them anymore (and no, I did have the right password). The volume must have gotten damaged when I transferred it. Fortunately, I had a backup from “last year” (12/27), and I could pretty much reconstruct the data.
What’s still missing? Mainly IntelliJ IDEA and a few utilities. My build environment for DrJava is already set up again, as are the JDKs and Perforce. A few other utilities need to be installed, and then that’s it. After that, I’m definitely going to create Ghost images of the hard drives so I can easily revert to this stage.
Now I’m pretty tired, but I’m already at the office. There’s a new policy at the department that PhD students have to attend the Friday lectures. But I’m happy — the new computer seems pretty fast, the install was pretty smooth, and I’m pretty much done.
