My desktop PC’s power supply blew up (literally) a few days ago. The family was unwilling to wait for the RMA process, so this gave a good excuse to upgrade (which, of course, I’ve been itching to do anyway).

Of course, the new machine came with Vista, which actually runs fairly well (the quad-core 2.4 GHz processor may have something to do with that… or it could be the 3 GB of RAM or the SATA RAID hard disks…). I put the drive from the old system in and started moving things over, but I ran into problems trying to delete some old directory trees (particularly the old Cygwin install) due to permission problems.

A bit of poking around on Google led to a useful tip on Tim Sneath’s MSDN blog: Windows Vista Secret #11: Deleting the Undeletable. The short version is:

    takeown /f directory /r /d y
    icacls directory /grant administrators:F /T

Works like a charm. Just use a command prompt with administrator privileges.

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!