Full up drives are driving me crazy

If you want to fix up some annoying glitch in a computer system, quite often upgrading something – operating system or RAM or storage or whatever – will get past it and make your life better. If you want to find an annoying glitch in a computer system, upgrade more than one thing. People will tell you upgrading bits and bobs is straightforward and easy. People lie.

For some time I’ve been tolerating a hard drive in my laptop that was bulging to near capacity, deleting stuff or moving it to archive drives to make space as needed. Replacing the startup drive in a laptop computer is an annoying hassle, so I was putting it off.

The main I keep my photo library on was also slowly filling, but with relatively infrequent updates and known increments (one 4GB card at a time) I wasn’t too worried. Meanwhile, the external drive on which my iTunes library resides was also slowly filling, gigabyte by gigabyte.

HD TV shows from the iTunes Store are my secret vice. All of these near-full drives were, as you might expect, not performing at their peak. The effect was that the entire system felt a bit sluggish and unstable – not unlike myself after consuming a KFC Double-Down a week or two back.

When iTunes wouldn’t let me download more TV shows, I knew the time had come. I bought a new, huge (OK, 2TB, but it’s big by my standards) external drive and copied my iTunes library to it. Then I cloned my startup drive to the external drive that had formerly held my iTunes library.

Note that neither of these is an entirely straightforward process, and tiny things can go wrong. Before proceeding any further, I really had to be sure that all was well.

Then my iPad 2 arrived. Oh dear.

Because I am an idiot who is easily distracted by shiny new toys I immediately plugged it into my computer to set it up. Remember that at this point the laptop is booting from an external drive, and the iTunes Library file (an XML spreadsheet that tells iTunes where to find all your stuff) was pointing at a disk that no longer contained my iTunes stuff. Neither the iTunes Library file nor the library itself were where the shiny new iPad wanted them to be.

What followed was an excruciating process helped along only by the ancient incantations I was occasionally shouting at it. It took hours to make my new iPad look just like my old one had. But then it was done.

Except, it needed an operating system upgrade. Joy.

Of course, I had already downloaded the iOS 4.3.1 update for my previous iPad, but that wasn’t going to work for the new one, was it? No, of course not. Three separate 600MB+ downloads of the same update. Bring on the NBN I say.

The operating system upgrade took ages, and of course after that it had to restore the data etc again. To make a long story less long, transferring my stuff from my old iPad to my new iPad took over seven hours — most of it not even Apple’s fault.

With that done, I replaced the internal drive on the laptop, cloned the system over to it, erased the external again and copied the photo library to its new, bigger home. The whole sliding puzzle took two days out of my life and shredded my sanity. But I had the satisfaction of a job well done.

Now to check System Update...

Matthew JC. Powell is a glutton for punishment. Tell him how much easier life would be if he used Windows on mjcp@me.com