External Hard Drives

[Inumo]

I'm looking to get an external hard drive so I can have a place to install TES: Oblivion, its expansions, and any mods I want/decide to make, along with any other stuff that's too big to run off a flash drive. First, is this a good idea, and second, what size/brand should I be going for? Thanks for any help in advance.

[Tapewolf]

The problem you're likely to have is that Oblivion stores all its savegames in your home directory, which is invariably on the system disk.  If you save regularly like I do, this will be a problem as the saves are not small.  There might be a way to tell it to store them on a disk which actually has space on it, but I'm not aware of one.

Under Vista or Windows 7 it is finally possible to create symbolic links using the mklink command, but I haven't tried doing this and I don't currently have Oblivion reinstalled since the last time Windows ate itself.

For external disks, you'll have a choice of technologies.  USB2 is obvious one but it might be too slow, I usually get up to about 30MB/s on mine, slightly less than a hard disk would around 1994.  If you have an E-SATA socket that might be the better approach, but I've not yet seen a machine which has this and I have no idea if they're hot-pluggable or if you have to reboot the machine for it to become live.
Firewire 800 is pretty decent but the drives are expensive and not all machines have a firewire port either.

What kind of computer is the host anyway?  A desktop, that you could add an interface card to, or a laptop?
If it's not got enough space to install Oblivion on, is the graphics card going to be up to snuff?

EDIT:
As for brands, what I'd usually do is buy a kit.  There are loads of external disk boxes out there, you just need to buy a suitably-sized disk and put them together with a screwdriver.  Dead easy.
I haven't seen any noticeable difference over a branded external disk, except that they are more expensive and sometimes more flakey (a'la the Maxtor ones a few years back that go to sleep without telling the computer and screw things up).

[Vidar]

I would get an external disk, and move all files that aren't used regularly to it.
Then install Oblivion on your internal disk, and play away. Savegames you no longer use can be archived to the external disk if/when you run out of diskspace again.

You don't want to run programs from your external drive, since they are inevitably slower.

If your disk is so small that Oblivion can't be installed on it, then what kind of dinosaur are you running? 

[Darkmoon]

If you have an XBox, Oblivion is pretty cheap. Much cheaper than a new HDD just to play it.

[Tapewolf]

If you have an XBox, Oblivion is pretty cheap. Much cheaper than a new HDD just to play it.

Yeah, but he wants to develop and/or play mods for it, though.

[Inumo]

The computer I'd be running Oblivion on is a desktop, with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ (2 GHz) and supposedly 1.93 GB of RAM. Graphics card wise, I got an nVidia GeForce 8500 GT to replace the one the computer came with. It's running Windows XP, and came with a 153 GB internal hard drive. Somehow, I've managed to fill it up to 139 GB, even with minimal music/video storage and periodic program uninstalling. There are probably more programs I can uninstall, just I haven't taken the time yet. Come to think of it, I should probably just ask: would it be smarter to just replace/upgrade some other piece of hardware before getting more space? Maybe just build a whole new computer?

[superluser]

Under Vista or Windows 7 it is finally possible to create symbolic links using the mklink command, but I haven't tried doing this and I don't currently have Oblivion reinstalled since the last time Windows ate itself.

Yeah, I was going to suggest symlinks, now that Microsoft has invented them. (This link appears to have been written by a Multician.  You have been warned.)

[Darkmoon]

If you have an XBox, Oblivion is pretty cheap. Much cheaper than a new HDD just to play it.

Yeah, but he wants to develop and/or play mods for it, though.

Bah! Too much effort!

[Inumo]

If you have an XBox, Oblivion is pretty cheap. Much cheaper than a new HDD just to play it.

Yeah, but he wants to develop and/or play mods for it, though.

Bah! Too much effort!

Helluva lot less work than trying to build this from scratch, though.

[Darkmoon]

This is why they invented game systems.

[RobbieThe1st]

Going back to the OP's question:
External harddrives are just your bog-standard 3.5" (or 2.5" laptop style for the "on-the-go" type externals) harddrive, with a small adapter-board that converts the harddrive's interface(SATA or regular ATA) to whatever connection the board supports. Those boards commonly support USB2.0, Firewire, and more recently, eSATA.
Of those three common interfaces:
1. USB2.0 is by far the most common, cheap and widely supported format. A drive that supports USB2.0 will work on just about -any- OS, including W2k+, Linux and OSX. The downside however is that it is slower - As Tapewolf said, you are talking around 30megs/sec(While not great for booting, probably fine for loading game data from, as long as you are willing to wait an extra minute).
2. Firewire(IEEE1394). Firewire is an Apple-patented product, and (until recently) cost more for manufacturers to implement it. This is why you won't find it on lower-end devices. It is a bit faster, depending on what spec your device and computer support.

3. eSATA. eSATA is just your typical SATA interface with a little bit different connector. a SATA drive can be plugged into an eSATA port, and vice-versa(with the proper adapter cable).
eSATA, just like SATA is hotplugable.


What this means is two things:
1. If you get an internal drive, you can get an adapter or full external-case and make it an internal drive.
2. If you find an external drive is cheaper, you can take it apart for the internal drive and use it in your PC.


Now, here is what I would do:
1. Get yourself a new SATA internal harddisk. I recommend a WD Caviar Blue 640GB, though Newegg's price isn't the best on that particular model. This drive is just about the fastest 7200RPM drive out there, great for a boot-drive.
2. Install it in your computer.
3. Use either a pay-for program like Norton Ghost or a free Linux CD to mirror the entire contents of your old drive onto the new one(we can provide instructions). Not only will your system be faster, but you will have no more space woes. You can then use a freely-available tool(there are several) to enlarge your NTFS partition to use the available space.
4. After several weeks of no issues, buy either an external case or a $6 USB->everything adapter off Ebay. Stick the old drive in it, format it, and use it for backing up your data.


Hope that helps!

-Rob

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Loathe as I am to admit it, I'm inclined to agree with Robbie. *grin*

It's not the best way to go about it, but it's a fairly good method. You may also want to poke at something like treesize to look at how much space you're using - it keeps moaning that "you're looking at big drives, and don't you really really really want to run the professional version instead by sending us lots of money?", but if you ignore that, the free version works fine to locate what's eating the space.

If you're using 139G, I'd say either system restore or backup copies of windows patches are sucking up all the space. Might be worth looking into those, before you go buying a large new drive.


Of course, you might need a new drive anyway. ;-]

Uh... don't delete all of the system restore stuff, though. Just a few of the older ones, if there's lots.

[Inumo]

May or may not be considered necro-ing with this (apologies if it is), but! I found a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB for $70 on TigerDirect. Planning on ordering it tomorrow, unless there are any major problems that arise with that memory expansion. I'm definitely going to need help with that third step from Robbie, though, and am a tad confused about step 4. Thanks for all the help so far, guys.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Technically, over a month is necro, but we get grumpy after 2 weeks in Lost Lake. Most of the other forums move much slower, however, so longer anti-necro timing is generally okay.

Situationally dependant, I guess. Although that makes for much more complex rules... :-/

[RobbieThe1st]

May or may not be considered necro-ing with this (apologies if it is), but! I found a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB for $70 on TigerDirect. Planning on ordering it tomorrow, unless there are any major problems that arise with that memory expansion. I'm definitely going to need help with that third step from Robbie, though, and am a tad confused about step 4. Thanks for all the help so far, guys.

Sure, just let me know when you get it, and I'll walk you through the process.
In the meantime, you should go ahead and download a Ubuntu CD image(go 32-bit if you -don't- have a Core2, i5/7, or AMD chip with two or more cores(x2 x3 x4)) : http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
Burn it to a physical CD, and keep that handy.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

FWIW, there's an app that will write the iso image to a usb stick, if you have a 1G one lying about.

If you can get the system to boot off of that, that'll work dandy. Most newer machines will, older machines are a little bit finicky. My servers all work fine with it, though.

The app is called unetbootin; it's available in the debian repositories, but if you google for it, I'm pretty sure I recall there being a windows version as well...

[Inumo]

The hard drive came in today, and the Ubuntu CD is burned... Now what?

[RobbieThe1st]

Oh, sorry for taking so long to reply; I didn't notice it.

Here's what you do:
1. Print out these instructions, or otherwise keep them handy
2. connect your new harddisk to your computer. Either internally, and the old one externally, or both internal. It doesn't matter.
2. boot off your Ubuntu CD. It will take a while to fully boot, as CDs are fairly slow.
3. Go into the main/start menu, and find "terminal". Open that. You should end up with a smallish empty window, either black on white or white on black, with a cursor in the upper left hand corner.
4. Type: "sudo apt-get install gparted ntfsprogs". To any questions answer yes. You may need to connect to the internet to do this.
5. Type: "sudo fdisk -l". This will list all harddisks and partitions. You should see two disks, "/dev/sda" and "/dev/sdb"(one may also be hda or hdb)
You need to figure out which is the old one and which is the new one. The old one should be smaller, etc.
Note that "/dev/sda", "/dev/sdb", "/dev/hda", or "/dev/hdb" are possible drive "names"(ignore any "/dev/sda#"). You need to write down which of those four is the old one, and which is the new one. Replace "*oldhd*" with the old one, and "*newhd*" with the new name in the following command:
"sudo dd if=*oldhd* of=*newhd* bs=4k"
This will copy all data from *oldhd* to *newhd*, so make sure you don't switch them around.
Now, as this will take a -long- time, if you want to check the status, open up a -second- terminal window and type:
"kill -USR1 `pidof dd`" This will display the (somewhat cryptic) status in the first terminal window.

6. Once the copy is done, go to the main menu/start menu and open "gparted". Now, selecting your new HD(its the bigger one) from the drop down box(top right), select your partition(s), right-click it and click "resize/move". Resize it to fill the available space, and click OK.
Once you are ready to have it actually -do- that change(and have made sure you've selected the right HD etc), click the Apply button.
This will take a while.

Once this is done, shut down the computer, pull out the old HD, plug the new one in and see if it boots. If it does, great. If not... write down what error or symptoms happen, put the old HD back in, and post them here.

I hope that helps,

-Rob

(P.S. Llearch, if you see this, would you mind double-checking what I wrote? I'm pretty sure everything's right, but you may see something I missed)

[Inumo]

I seem to have hit an issue at step 6. GParted is saying:

ERROR(2): Failed to check '/dev/sdb1' mount state: No such file or directory
Probably /etc/mtab is missing. It's too risky to continue. You might try another Linux distro.

Any idea what's up?

P.S. Posting this from Ubuntu. So shiny... XD

[RobbieThe1st]

I think a good idea would be to reboot, remove your old HD, and complete steps 1 through 4, then skip to 6
I'm guessing its something to do with things getting changed as we copied the entire disk contents.
Note also, if you want, when you resize your disk, leave ~20GB or so free at the end of the drive. You can then install Ubuntu to that space(just click the install icon once you are done resizing and everything), and you will have a dual-boot machine. These days, its easy!

[Drayco84]

...Or, you could track down a certain file and edit it so it it looks for sda1...

I had gone through this LAST month... Lemme double-check somethings...

EDIT:
Ah, what's in the grub.conf file? If I remember right, it should be in the 'grub' folder in the root directory...

[Tapewolf]

Ah, what's in the grub.conf file? If I remember right, it should be in the 'grub' folder in the root directory...

If it's grub2 (which it should be on the latest versions) it'll be in /boot/grub/grub.cfg
If it's the original version, it'll be /boot/grub/menu.cfg

[Drayco84]

If it's grub2 (which it should be on the latest versions) it'll be in /boot/grub/grub.cfg

It'll be that one, thanks Tapewolf.
Within the file, you'll see some entries that contain "hd(*,*)". The first * is probably 1, (Might be 2, I forget.) and refers to the drive the file is SUPPOSED to look for in order to boot from. Simply subtract 1 from it and change it. (In other words, if it's already 1, change it to 0.) Then search through the file and do the same with the others. (It might be handy to make a copy of the file and save it somewhere else BEFORE editing and/or posting a copy of its contents here.)

[Inumo]

FYI, hard drive has been repartitioned. The rebooting-minus-old-HD did the trick.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

(P.S. Llearch, if you see this, would you mind double-checking what I wrote? I'm pretty sure everything's right, but you may see something I missed)

Looks fine to me, other than explaining what the kill thing does. if there's more than one thing that matches dd, pidof will return interesting results...