Computers, Cars & Creatures

The weekend arrived and it was time to head south to fix a family member's computer. This was no normal fix as it was going to be an upgrade from a 160gb SSD to a 4TB NVMe drive.

For those who wonder how we got into this situation - a little tale. About a decade ago when a new computer arrived for this family member we just took the hard drive from the old computer and stuck it into the new. A proper fresh Windows install would have been the way, but it seemed easier to just a move a drive.

With a pair of 2TB SATA drives installed in a RAID setup I re-mapped Documents, Photos, Videos and Downloads off the C drive so the only thing competing for space on that little C drive was the operating system. This proved to work well for another solid amount of years until 2025 came knocking.

It may have been the yearly installs of Turbo Tax that weren't deleted, but the real culprit was the growing Microsoft Outlook data file that had surpassed 30 gigabytes and showed no sign of slowing down as emails came in.

There was no chance of moving Program Files so it was time to actually upgrade the 160GB SSD to something newer. After disassembling the computer I had to remove the GPU to make room for the NVMe drive. I had forgotten one of the NVMe slots was actually filled with a 250GB drive that had joined the RAID array, so I left it as-is. That was the original hard-drive when this computer was purchased that we bypassed when we installed the original drive.

With the new NVMe drive connected - we now had 2 NVMe & 3 SSD's connected with 2 PCIe slots taken with the GPU and WiFi adapter. I booted into the BIOS and sadly the new NVMe was not detected and I feared failure.

I loaded up the manual for the motherboard and finally I saw a note that explained my failure. Some ports were sharing bandwidth and I had to move some things around to free usage of both M2.2 and M2.1 at once. So after another round of moving internal parts around I booted up the computer and every single peripheral was detected. So I finally was to the point of launching Clonezilla and beginning a "disk to disk" clone procedure.

Little did I know this was not going to work with cryptic error after error. So I decided to flash a different program (GParted Live) and give it another shot. Silly me as GParted Live just uses Clonezilla for copies - so I was stuck at the same level.

During the flashing process of GParted I was using a program called balenaEtcher which did offer a disk clone feature so I figured what the hell and gave it a shot. To my surprise a copy started of the 160GB disk and completed about 10 minutes later. I didn't really trust this, so I disconnected the old drive and instead attempted to boot the 4TB new NVMe and it booted into Windows 10 instantly!

Of course the C drive was still near 100%, but I was surprised this process worked after failing on other tools. So now I booted back into GParted Live to move this recovery partition towards the end of the disk and grow the primary. No matter what I tried I could not move the recovery partition towards the end as cryptic errors came up, so I resulted in just deleting the recovery partition and growing the intended partition.

When it maxed out at 2TB I remembered my issue - this disk was still using the legacy MBR (Master Boot Record) for partitioning instead of the default GPT (GUID Partition Table) that has become quite modern.

Knowing I had deleted the recovery partition, had cloned the hard drive growing it from 160GB to 2TB and was hitting hour 4 - I called it there. The next task that awaits is booting into Windows recovery and preforming a "MBR 2 GPT", which should allow me to expand that C drive into 4TB of space.

It was time to head on home, but the road had a different idea for me as my low tire pressure light went on. I toggled over to the tire pressures and saw 37, 37, 36 and 19. At that point I knew something was surely wrong as a low tire pressure reading in the teens hinted at a puncture.

Thankfully I had just pulled onto the road and within a couple hundred feet was a gas station which I rolled into and stopped. Checking the driver's rear wheel and near instantly I spotted this bolt/screw lodged into my wheel.

This car had just passed 10k miles and already had a massive screw lodged into the wheel so I was upset. Thankfully I'm sitting in Ruskin Florida which has gas stations and car repair shops as far as the eye can see. I began calling the shops across the street and while the first repair shop was busy till Monday - the 2nd one said an hour wait.

So I carefully drove the car across the street on a tire that had fallen to 15psi and waited for an investigation.

Sadly to my surprise this was no little screw. This looked to remember a large white Tapcon screw and had done some damage to my wheel. Whether the repair shop was lying to me or being truthful - I don't know, but they said there was zero chance they could patch this - the tire was ruined.

Can't really buy 1 tire without unbalancing things so I chose a cheaper tire to get me back home until I could visit a Hyundai dealership to correct my off-brand tire replacement. Turns out modern Hyundai's (Hybrid Sonata 2023) don't ship with a spare anymore - just a little tire repair kit hiding in the wheel well.

All in all - pretty good luck to lose a wheel in viewing distance of a gas station and repair shop and 3 hour turnaround is not bad at all for a weekend car emergency.

Finally we arrive at a visit to the Tampa Aquarium to meet some creatures and fish to end the weekend. Immediately this visit was crazy cool as you walk into this area where ducks and fish are just in touching distance with no cage! Literally the ducks are walking on the railing where you are walking with fish below.

I had never felt so close to animals that didn't seem to care about a couple hundred humans walking next to them. As each minute increased from their 9:30am opening - the amount of kids increased heavily which made it a bit difficult to calmly visit each exhibit.

We arrived at the eel's and one looked so creepily cool I had to take a video of it chewing some food.

These creatures just feel prehistoric watching them moving around all snake like. Paired with their constant look of glaring made it look like a cool creature.

However - then we got to the seahorses which were so much smaller than I even remembered and maybe arguably more cool than the eels.

I never realized these little seahorses have a little fin on the back of their body which moves in overdrive to help them navigate. I put the phone away after this point as the amount of kids increased too heavily to capture good footage.

After about an hour and half we had explored every exhibit with just a bit of sadness that the penguin exhibit was under construction. The weekend of computers, car repairs and creatures was over.