Reader Questions

I'm glad my hardware and software misadventures caught your interest. It's always nice to see comments and get the private emails after a, er, somewhat unusual post. :)

Maybe More on Windows 7 wasn't so strange, but Something stirs in the rubble.... certainly felt strange from this end.

If for nothing else, at least I can serve as an example of what sleep deprivation and fatigue toxins can do. If I were feeling graphical right now, I might put it this way:

This is your mind:







This is your mind after 36 hours
of nonstop geekery:

Anyway, Ed_P suggested that I should have used Bart's PE, a nifty little self-booting, self-contained Windows-live-on-a-CD. It's hugely customizable, too. I agree with Ed that it's a great tool.

And I do have a Bart's CD ready to go, with a pile of repair and diagnostic tools also on the CD. Alas, XP couldn't properly see the hard drive, so the PE setup/recovery tools were useless. Ditto the original XP setup CDs. If XP can't see the drive, no XP-based tool will work.

The really strange thing was that MS-DOS, Windows 98, FreeDOS and Linux all could see the hard drive just fine. But not XP or Vista.

I ultimately wiped the disk using BootIt NG, then gave the disk over to a wholly alien OS; one that had never been on that drive before. I let Kbuntu format the entire disk as ext3 and then let GRUB set up the Linux boot records. Linux installed and ran just fine. (Linux itself is fine. I just don't like it all that much. Too much effort for too little reward.)

Once I was sure the hard drive was working normally, I then used BootIt to wipe out the new Linux setup. My thinking was that, if a mangled bit had been preventing XP from seeing the drive, that bit would likely be at least twice overwritten now, and thus probably beaten back into submission.

I then formatted the disk as NTFS and FAT32, and--- it worked. I was able to install Vista from DVD. I then let Bootit take over partition management and the boot sequencing... and all was well.

Once the drive was working, I could have restored a disk image and gotten the previous working setup back in one step. This is, in fact, the way I'd normally do this.

But I wanted to upgrade my laptop from Vista Home Premium to Vista Business so I could more easily run virtual machines (I use them to test software), among other things.

I did a clean install of Vista Biz to give myself the best possible start. I could and did restore my data from previous images and backups, but I didn't want the previous OS; hence the clean install.

Brad Gilbert also wondered about my 1TB drive; it's fine, at last. Long story. (Actually, two stories, because I also got another large external drive. Yes, my backups have backups.)

When I'm finally done cannibalizing the old hardware and spreading it around, I should end up with 2 laptops (a nice main one and a barely adequate, last-ditch spare), a brand new kick-ass desktop system with 2.25TB of onboard storage and 1TB external; and a couple of Frankenstein test rigs.

I'm not done yet, but I can see the phosphor at the end of the screen, so to speak. I've taken photos along the way; some of the experimental stuff might be mildly amusing for you to see.

Stay tuned!