100 monkeys typing.

Ka-Boom!

What a holiday break!

For xmas I got Adobe PhotoAlbum 2.0. The drawback was that it only runs under Windows XP. Figuring since I had the time to invest, I would go ahead and bite the bullet and upgrade from Windows 98 to XP. Good thing I had the time.

The XP install was much more brutal than I expected it to be, given the hype. I lost all of my registry, most of my system files, all of my "favorites", all of the desktop items and other miscellaneous works in progress. This, was just the icing on the upgrade cake. Once the installation was completed and I was able to get back into the system, my slave drive wasn't accessible.

My Western Digital 40gig HD was showing up as a 2.2gig RAW partition that couldn't be read. Microsoft's help pages, Western Digital's help pages and all of my Google searches couldn't produce a solution. After downloading tool after tool after tool to try and recover the data, I wound up losing 100% of the archived MP3s, images, movies etc on the drive. Damn! Yesterday at about noon, I found the solution. In Windows 98 with the Phoenix 4.0 Release 6 BIOS, there was a drive size limitation. To compensate for this, a secondary jumper on the back of the hard drive was required. Once XP was installed, it no longer required this "work-around". After powering down, pulling the jumper (the one closest to the power supply) and rebooting, we're now back up and running at 100%.................minus the programs that won't run under XP.

Oy Vey.

New Year's Resolution: Back up weekly.

Posted by kerry at December 31, 2003 06:19 PM | TrackBack