eSATA frustration

I had K put together a 1 terabyte external Samsung SATA/USB drive for my Windows (XP) PC. SATA is a format different from IDE, which is what the motherboard defaults to.  Anyway he built it into an external case, installed the plug into the back of the PC, and the first time it booted it connected fine. But when attempted to set up partitions and so on using Manage Computer things froze. When I rebooted the drive had become invisible to the PC (and no, it doesn't run under DOS)!

But it gets weirder. When I boot Ubuntu it can see the drive fine and I can even run GParted on it. And after I installed an Windows update XP started to see the drive some of the time, with a v-e-r-y l-o-n-g boot time. Strange. When I go into manage devices and rescan it mostly finds the external drive, but the details never seem to stick.

Very frustrating. I had this set up so that when I have a a whole bunch of 300 dpi print files for the graphic novels, I can just take the drive with me and get the thing printed. And in theory the thing should be a good form of backup as well. But something is obviously wrong here.

HUNGRY Beast Drug Survey Results

This has some unexpected results.

One of the survey’s most interesting results concerned what people thought would happen if illegal drugs were decriminalized. Although only 3% of people said they would personally use drugs more often, 62% said they thought other people would. The results were similar when we asked whether you’d be more likely to try drugs at all (only 5% said they would, but 66% thought others would).

It seems we define the people who can’t be trusted with drugs as everyone but ourselves.

I was also interested in the segments on this weeks show about the ETHICS OF DRUGS (four illegal drugs are analysed for the ethical consumer), andCOPS AGAINST DRUG LAWS (Cops are on the frontline of the “War on Drugs”. But here, and elsewhere around the world, they’re joining the growing chorus of experts calling to end that war).