Oops.
So, a buddy of mine at work gave me his computer to re-install XP. He's a gamer, but beyond that he doesn't know much about computers.
He's got two hard drives, one IDE and one SATA. The SATA had his XP install on it, and his IDE has all his personal data. Neither of which is recognized by his BIOS. What's up with that?
Long story short, I formatted the wrong drive because the XP setup doesn't recognize SATA drives without special drivers you have to install beforehand (using a diskette no less!) So now I'm unformatting his drive to recover his data (only 4 hours to go!) This better work or I'm gonna be pissed.
In my defense, his IDE (data) drive also had a windows installation on it. So this guy had two copies of XP installed on his machine. No wonder he couldn't get the stupid thing activated again.
I have to say, though, that installing XP on a SATA drive was a cool experience. I've never had XP complete setup so quickly. Only 20 minutes from start to finish whereas it usually takes about an hour. For me, anyway.
He's got two hard drives, one IDE and one SATA. The SATA had his XP install on it, and his IDE has all his personal data. Neither of which is recognized by his BIOS. What's up with that?
Long story short, I formatted the wrong drive because the XP setup doesn't recognize SATA drives without special drivers you have to install beforehand (using a diskette no less!) So now I'm unformatting his drive to recover his data (only 4 hours to go!) This better work or I'm gonna be pissed.
In my defense, his IDE (data) drive also had a windows installation on it. So this guy had two copies of XP installed on his machine. No wonder he couldn't get the stupid thing activated again.
I have to say, though, that installing XP on a SATA drive was a cool experience. I've never had XP complete setup so quickly. Only 20 minutes from start to finish whereas it usually takes about an hour. For me, anyway.