Posted on January 13, 2007
Filed Under MetaBlog | Leave a Comment
New look, new purpose…. Susan wasn’t really updating the old site, and I was reluctant to geek it out too much given it was supposed to be for the whole family. Well, she took off the family site, so now it’s mine!!!
So, new (sucky, but best I could do on a moment’s notice) name, new theme, and more tech content (when I get a round tiut, of course).
Posted on January 12, 2007
Filed Under Computers | Leave a Comment
So I decided it was time to upgrade to a big, fast SATA hard drive. I found a good deal at CompUSA on a 500 GB Western Digital SATA-2 drive to replace my aging 160 GB ATA-100. I’ve been through this process many, many times since I got my first 40 MB drive back in the day, so I didn’t expect too many issues.
Installation was pretty painless, the ASUS A8N-SLI mobo has support for 4 SATA drives, and my Antec Sonata case has SATA power connectors (which, interestingly, are about twice the size of the data cable), so I plugged it in, turned the SATA interface on in the BIOS (I tend to disable things I’m not using) and booted into Windows.
XP recognized the new hardware, asked for the nForce4 SATA drivers (the latest of which were already sitting on the IDE drive) and installed them. A quick click through the WD install software and the drive was formatted. I started the WD drive migration tool on the expectedly long process of copying 140 or so GB of data from the old drive to the new and headed to bed. I was a bit suspicious of the tool’s ability to copy everything over while XP was running, but I figured I’d give it a shot and headed to bed.
In the morning the copy was done, so I shut down Windows, removed the IDE drive, and powered back up. The BIOS screens flashed by, then I saw it: “Error Loading Operating System”. Apparently my drive, which was perfectly accessible from a fully booted XP install, was not bootable.
To make a (very) long story short, I tried a lot of things to fix this. I started by using Acronis True Image to reimage the drive without XP running. No luck, so off to Google.
I saw lots of recommendations to do a repair install, which requires a driver floppy to access the SATA drives in this system. Since I don’t have a floppy (and the ultra-modern XP operating system doesn’t seem to think this is possible) I couldn’t use my boot media, so I downloaded a fresh copy of nLite and bundled the drivers into a new, custom install CD (along with SP2, which was already on the system). I tried using the recovery console from this CD (which could access the drive just fine), but no amount of “fixboot” type stuff helped. I tried a repair install and still couldn’t boot. Finally I reformatted the disk and did a new install. It still would not boot.
Then I found a post that recommended changing the disk access mode setting in the BIOS from “Auto” to “Large” (the only other setting…). This changed the boot error message, so I started another clean XP install. This time I made it through the reboot and into the GUI installer, so I shut down, reinstalled the IDE drive, and reimaged (with True Image). Everything is now working beautifully!
This only took about 14 hours for someone with 20+ years of computer experience and a degree in the field. No wonder people pay Best Buy to do this crap!