March 15, 2007
No nifty story about having to reinstall W2K -- the five-year-old Maxtor drive I first installed on finally went off to that giant bit bucket in the sky. I was able to retrieve all of my data from the thing, where it now has plenty of room to grow on my 244-gig logical drive.
Of course, I managed to foul it up and forced myself to reinstall Windows again (after spending an afternoon downloading eight years of patches) by screwing up the swap file somehow. When I first reinstalled, I left my old Maxtor in as a slave drive. Windows Setup decided that it should keep its C: drive letter, slapping my new drive at the end of the line after my 2 DVD drives. Which left me with:
- Old Maxtor drive, b0rken Windows install
- DVD-ROM drive
- DVD+RW drive
- New system, on first 128 of 400 GB
I couldn't format the whole drive at once because W2K couldn't do 42-bit drive addressing until service pack 3, and I had the original version.
When I got everything patched I installed the Seagate partition program that came with the new drive. Then I juggled drive letters, setting the new data drive (née G:) to be C:, and sent the old Maxtor to the back of the line (G:). Then I rebooted.
I think the system decided that the swap belonged on C:, then got pissed off when it couldn't find pagefile.sys in the right place. Rather than boot without a swap file (I also upgraded myself to 2 GB of RAM) it just choked at the login screen. So I got to blow up the install and start over, finally finishing at 3:30 AM (actually 4:30 AM, since the switch to Daylight Saving Time happened while I was trying to figure out how to make IE behave).
Loads of fun.
Got everything set back up, though, and organizaed my install CDs better so the next time this happens I should be able to just zip through my installs. Of course, Seagates last a while, so hopefully I'm done watching progress bars at 640x480 for a few years.
Computer runs really well now, though. Nice and fast.
