Being it a long weekend and being me not having anything to do on the weekend, I decided that I should put my Windows installation on the spare 320GB drive I won from InLAN from the 200GB drive I originally planned to give to Devastator in exchange for headphones he won. It sounds simple, just make a backup using something like Norton Ghost, and then write that to the new drive.
I didn’t use Ghost.
I used DriveClone, a program that Devastator won at InLan (seeing a pattern here?) and that seemed to work.
Until I tried to boot off the drive.
[code] NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart [/code]
WONDERFUL!
So I do what I usually do when I get that error message, in this order: 1) Growl in frustration. 2) Pull the power cable out and switch it off. 3) Simmer for about 30 seconds. 4) Plug the power cable back in and switch it back on.
Then it usually works, and it did this time too. Then Windows got all the way up to the welcome screen and stopped. No accounts, no login box, nada. Just the welcome screen.
WONDERFUL!
So I plugged the old harddrive back in, did ANOTHER clone using DriveClone (which, if Dev doesn’t want it I will run over with my car because each clone only takes an hour) and tried again.
This time it got straight to the Windows welcome screen again. No accounts, no login box, nada.
WONDERFUL!
Ok. By this time I was mildly annoyed (read: anything that was not bolted down had the potential to be thrown across the room at great speed and inaccuracy) so I went and played on the Xbox 360 for a little while whilst thinking about what the hell I could do.
I settled on finally installing Windows, just Windows XP w/ Service Pack 2, to the 320GB drive. That worked. It booted. I rejoiced. I was HAPPY.
Then I wanted to copy over my files.
So I went into what I thought was the most important, my pictures directory. Only when I went to D:\Documents and Settings\Radar it said “Access Denied”.
WONDERFUL!
I then found out on the internet that if you go into Tools -> Options -> View and then right down the bottom of the list of checkboxes is “Use simple file sharing (recommended)” and if you turn it off then you can claim ownership of any folder, as long as you were Administrator. Thanks to the default Windows XP install, I was Administrator and not-so-quickly (thanks Windows!) gained ownership of the folders. I copied them over and then got all my music and did something that will surprise you.
I BACKED UP.
That’s right. I used Windows built-in backing up feature and backed up my old drive. Now all that’s left to do is to install everything. Again.
LPC review coming soon. Most likely the next blog entry.