Doing Things the Hard Way
A few days ago I noticed that my computer was making a lot of seemingly unnecessary hard drive reads, and the drive was not making its usual read sound. This was a patterned sound like "ERRT ERRT ERRT" instead of the usual more continuous noise. I checked my System alerts and discovered that I was getting a large number of disk read errors on my system drive. Great.
In order to rebuild Windows, I would need a new hard drive. I don't like to have anything critical on the same drive as my OS, and with a drive that I could no longer trust completely, I needed a new drive. Since I didn't want to discard the partially broken drive, this presented a problem. I already had 4 IDE devices. Well, the obvious solution was to by a SATA controller card and drive! Fry's has a sale going right now for a 250 GB western digital drive (identical to the one I already have except for the SATA plug) for like $100 after rebates, so I couldn't pass that up. I picked up a SATA card, and while I was there, the Sonic MEGACOLLECTION for PS2.
The steps for reinstalling Windows should have been easy:
However, I failed to realize that boot.ini absolutely must be on the primary master hard disk, which was at the time still the damaged drive. If only I had realized this first thing I could have saved myself a lot of time. The steps I went through were more like this:
So all in all, I installed Windows 4 times, and was forced to move large amounts of data that I didn't want to move around just to make a workable machine. I got started around one with the install process, and I finished the last step at 3:30am. At some point in there something messed with the file system on my large drive, and I nearly lost the 180 GB of stuff on there. Chckdsk fixed everything, but that was a little vexing.
While waiting on some of the longer steps I played my new PS2 game, which was totally worth $20. Mean Bean Machine alone sold me on the cartridge, but it also contains Sonic 1, 2, and 3 and all the Gamegear varieties of those games. Plus there appears to be more games that get unlocked somehow. All this, and the game lets you use save states, which is just awesome, though not as awesome as the single button save states that I get to use in zsnes and the like.
In order to rebuild Windows, I would need a new hard drive. I don't like to have anything critical on the same drive as my OS, and with a drive that I could no longer trust completely, I needed a new drive. Since I didn't want to discard the partially broken drive, this presented a problem. I already had 4 IDE devices. Well, the obvious solution was to by a SATA controller card and drive! Fry's has a sale going right now for a 250 GB western digital drive (identical to the one I already have except for the SATA plug) for like $100 after rebates, so I couldn't pass that up. I picked up a SATA card, and while I was there, the Sonic MEGACOLLECTION for PS2.
The steps for reinstalling Windows should have been easy:
- Install card and drive
- Install Windows to drive
- Recover data from old drive
However, I failed to realize that boot.ini absolutely must be on the primary master hard disk, which was at the time still the damaged drive. If only I had realized this first thing I could have saved myself a lot of time. The steps I went through were more like this:
- Install card and drive
- Realize that the card I have doesn't have a driver disk, so the Windows installer can't detect the SATA card
- Curse
- Steal SATA controller and Floppy drive from dad (Yes, he had extras of both of these things)
- Find that the floppy drive I've taken is not reading
- Curse
- Steal another floppy drive from another computer
- Install Windows to freshly partitioned SATA drive
- The Windows installation reboots to my broken drive
- Curse
- Backup everything from the two partitions on the broken drive
- Format the drive
- OS not found error
- Curse
- Install Windows again
- Find that Windows has installed to the SATA, but is still using the old broken drive as the System disk
- Curse
- Decide that booting to the SATA is too difficult
- Transfer all 180 GB of files from the other 250 GB drive to the new one
- Format the drive for use as the system disk
- Note that unpatched XP installations can't read drives greater than 138 GB
- Curse
- Boot to the disk that came with the drive, force a new partition
- Reinstall Windows
- Note that I've forgotten to change which drive is the master drive
- Curse
- Switch the IDE cables around
- Execute a "Repair" on Windows expecting that it would change Windows to be on the new C drive
- Find that "Repair" involves reinstalling Windows again
- Find that the "Repair" has forced drive C to be drive E and Windows is still booting to drive E
- Curse
- Reinstall Windows
So all in all, I installed Windows 4 times, and was forced to move large amounts of data that I didn't want to move around just to make a workable machine. I got started around one with the install process, and I finished the last step at 3:30am. At some point in there something messed with the file system on my large drive, and I nearly lost the 180 GB of stuff on there. Chckdsk fixed everything, but that was a little vexing.
While waiting on some of the longer steps I played my new PS2 game, which was totally worth $20. Mean Bean Machine alone sold me on the cartridge, but it also contains Sonic 1, 2, and 3 and all the Gamegear varieties of those games. Plus there appears to be more games that get unlocked somehow. All this, and the game lets you use save states, which is just awesome, though not as awesome as the single button save states that I get to use in zsnes and the like.