The old desktop did indeed yield another slim adaptor, so that's a handy spare to have.
The PavNAS has been up & running for over a month with no complaints and I can access it from the other machines in the house at any time with no problems. What a result: the whole reason I started this log was to detail my NAS journey and that journey has been undertaken & completed!
PiNAS was a bust, as I should have known it would be, and buying a proper NAS is needlessly expensive; an old Windows laptop with a bunch of hard-drives attached is cheap and easy to set up. I should really spread the word…
Part of me is sad that I gave up on Raspberry Pi and Linux, as it was a journey that I started in earnest well over a decade ago. I feel slightly deflated that I didn't persevere with it and work through the difficulties.
…but then part of me is glad that I reälised I struggling with a challenge which I didn't enjoy. Linux never made intuïtive sense to me, but I think what put me off the most was when I went looking for help. Not only was the learning curve for command line stuff incredibly steep, but every response to a query I saw always assumed some knowledge, meaning more searching to learn that knowledge. It was all such a waste of time & effort. And don't get me started on that Reddit-twonk who kept insisting the Pi problem was power… Sure, I may yet have to learn Linux one day when the Windowspocalypse happens, but at the moment I am very happy to continue using the Windows I am familiar with.
Pivoting slightly to backing-up data: I've mashed together a 500gb harddrive of ‘essential’ data in a USB case as an off-site backup. Being slightly paranoid about that data being elsewhere, I looked into ways of password-protecting the drive and the best way I found was using Veracrypt. This creates an encrypted container which is password-protected against access. The only disadvantage I've found is that you have to have Veracrypt installed in order to mount the container as a drive for access. Still, it's fairly straightforward and free.
https://veracrypt.eu/en/Beginner%27s%20Tutorial.html
I had a bit of trouble with it initially because I was using a USB HDD enclosure which I didn't know had some loose connection going on. This led me to believe that it wasn't working when I tried it on the kitchen T410 (that it was the old style of enclosure with a double USB lead for power also added to the confusion). Anyway, trying combinations of leads and enclosures led to the dodgy PCB conclusion (there's evidence that some amateur soldering has taken place on it, but I don't remember doing it…) so that enclosure has been retired. It's a shame as it's anodised red and is definitely the coolest-looking peripheral I have.
I was thinking my IT work had calmed down a bit now, but there're still tasks to undertake:
Boot old desktop and see what data is on there. Reïnstall it back under the stairs.
Finalise Win7 installation on T410-compatible drive, especially getting Memory Map up & running and checking GPS connects ok.
Both old AIOs and the Dell laptop are still running Win10 Pro which goes out-of-support in October. Need to think about changing them over to IoT…
PSXPC! Need to get PlayStation emulator up & running in a more intuïtive way, plus look into SNES & N64 emulators.
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I need to write about Windows acquisitions!
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Decided to stop playing Civilization for a bit and get down to “work” on finalising the Win7 installation on an SSD fitted in a T410. Then I'll have a disk which I can just slide into any T410 and use Memory Map. It'll make me less reliant on the aging T60…
Booted up the “spare parts” T410 (connected via VGA to the big Dell monitor) and found that all I had done before was literally just install Windows 7; thanks, past me…
It was giving me shit about scanning the extra HDD fitted in the (slim!) optical drive bay adaptor; seems that HDD (from the Mac Mini) still had a system partition on it. Got rid of that (without even having to use Diskpart!) and it's all good.
Windows 7 was not activated, and none of the loaders I had to hand worked to activate it. Arse. Seems I may have butted up to this issue a couple of months back (19th Jan) as I'd downloaded another Win7 ISO. Let's Rufus that onto a USB and have a go at reïnstalling Windows; I literally CANNOT ZARKING WAIT to piss about trying to install drivers again…
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Goddamnit, the machine started giving me shit even BEFORE installing Windows! Refused to boot from USB, even when selected from Boot Menu; had to exclude the harddrive from boot menu in BIOS in order to FORCE it to boot from USB.
REMEMBER TO ADD IT BACK IN AFTER INSTALLATION.
…immediate issue where Win7 installation claims it can't be installed to the harddrive, though it did, unusually helpfully, hint that it was due to not being bootable cos BIOS:
“Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu.”
Luckily, I'd got far enough in the installation to delete the existing partitions; this meant that the computer COULDN'T boot from the harddrive even if it wanted to, so had to boot from USB.
Further weirdness: mouse pointer can be moved in installation program, but no clicks work, either built-in or with external mouse… Luckily it can all be done via keyboard.
Currently installing…
