Musical Hard Drives

Musical Hard Drives: A techie's struggle to preserve his gadgets balloons out of proportion

1. PS3's hard drive grows close to full over a period of several months. User considers the idea of buying a new one entirely but decides to just upgrade the hard drive for much cheaper and avoid ever having such a problem again with a nice 750 gig hard drive as opposed to an 80 gig he had in the system before. 
2. User logs into Newegg to order Laptop drives.
3. User finds good deal on laptop drives and decides to buy an extra to revive an old laptop as a Linux machine. 
4. User receives laptop drives in the mail! User prepares external hard drive to backup PS3.
5. External hard drive cannot be read by consoles because it's formatted in NTFS. User seeks guides which tell him to format the drive in Fat32.
6. User discovers that Windows cannot out of the box format drives to Fat32 for partitions larger than 32GB. Given that the PS3's hard drive has 80GB of data, 32GB is not enough for a backup. 
7. User tears hair out trying to find a way to format the drives including using the Windows command line and trying Windows 7 to do the job. To no avail.
8. User finds third party tool to reformat the drive. User copies all data off external, deletes partition to prepare for backup. User reformats drive in FAT32.
9. User backs up PS3 onto drive.
10. User puts laptop drive in PS3 and restores it from the backup. This part went well. 
11. User attempts to put extra laptop drive he ordered in old laptop, not realizing that old laptop is kind of archaic and only uses IDE drives. This one is totally user's fault.
12. User orders enclosure to turn extra laptop SATA drive into external drive. Because he has to do something with it. 
13. User builds external drive. It works. Does not really have anything to do with it other than having an extra backup.
14. User prepares to order IDE drive to revive old laptop as a Linux machine. Because he has to do something with it. 
15. User's main PC starts acting up! Good thing user has everything backed up on an external so he can format quickly...wait...
16. User backs up everything on external, preparing to format his OS drive on his main PC.
17. User writes a post on his crappy blog documenting his progress in this escapade.

Things learned from this:

• NTFS is not a good way to format a disc when you planning on using it on things that aren't PCs.
• If it says it can't format it in that format, it probably can't format it in it. No amount of trying to trick it into formatting it that way is going to work. 
• "Ooh, a good deal!" is not a good reason to add to a workload
• "But you have to do something with it!" is never a good reason to add to a workload
• Have multiple externals around so you can back stuff up easily, and so you can be assured that stuff is still backed up even if you have to reformat an external.