I bought a new hard drive. Mostly because it was 200G for $60. The very next day the hard drive on my linux box started puking up those drive seek errors that are a good sign you are about to loose a drive. Not really surprising. That drive was a 12G drive circa 90something.
It would appear that I have powers to see into the future and did a good job predicting this failure and had a drive now available.
Here is the rub. I do all my video editing on my windows box. And the 280G on that box was getting full. I had 16G left. The plan was to use the drive utils that came with the 200G drive and copy the partition from the 80G drive to the 200G drive. Then move my 80G drive to the linux box. And BAM I have 400G on the video editing box.
This plan worked exactly like all my plans that involve Microsoft software. It didn’t.
Read on for the details.
The new drive came with software to copy the partition. This util wanted to do all the work from within XP to get all the NTFS stuff right I guess.
So the copy starts.
A little while later it is still going.
still
going…..
Then it finished. I was instructed to move the new drive to the boot drive (primary master) and remove the old drive. I followed the directions. WinXP starts to boot and I am thinking, “wow it worked”. We get to the welcome screen. And we are still at the welcome screen. So I wait 15 min and start to search google on the net.
Turns out that winXP will create some sort of hash for any drive it ever finds out about. It them assigns a drive letter to that drive. In my case drive F:. So after I moved it winXP booted from it and got to the point that it was looking for c:\windows\somesystemcrap and it can’t find drive C: because it thinks this is drive F: !!!! WTF?
Trying to change a drive letter on winXP to C: takes an act of God. And since God seems to be busy with all the acts related to leveling Florida with hurricanes I was out of luck.
I spend 6 hours on and off trying to fix this without doing what I should have done from the start.
I reinstalled the machine.
And then windows update decided that I was a good candidate for SP2. Half my software will not install because winXP SP2 is claiming that said software is not compatible. However ever support forum I have gone to so far has a work around for getting the software to work.
This should have taken 1 hour. It is going to take several orders of magnitude more.
Tonight I start looking for the open source projects for video editing. This sucks and I am done.
