Progress? 23% [very long post]

July 31st, 2007 § 1

I am soooo bored of progress bars, error messages and install CDs, I cannot possibly tell you. Plus I now know much much more about partition tables, file systems, disk recovery and master boot records than I ever wished to. Allow me to explain, expand, expound and exposit.

A short while ago a friend of mine donated an old PC to my cause, as my ageing machine was only a Pentium III 1Ghz, and was quite frankly creaking with age. The donated machine, an off-cast of his brother-in-law’s, was slightly faster being an AMD K6 1400Mhz with a much better graphics card and a couple of bigger hard drives than I had. I decided that this was the time to move on up to Windows XP and away from Windows 2000. That stage of things went pretty smoothly, all in all, although one thing that did catch me out was my not noticing that the motherboard had an extra 12v power socket next to the AGP graphics slot. This ultimately caused several BSODs and misc shutdowns, but in the end I found it and nothing was lost.

My old machine was a Win98/Win2k dual-boot affair, with Win98 being retained purely as an audio recording environment. My audio recording software would install in Win2k, but it didn’t like it very much, plus I had everything else running in Win2k and when you’re doing audio recording, you really want as few programs running as possible, so it seemed sensible to have a clean install OS to run it under.

When I moved up to XP, I originally intended to use the newer XP-centric version of my recording software, but on trying it, I found that it didn’t import my old songs properly and of course a lot of the effects and plugins I had were no longer present or available. I decided fairly quickly that I would be returning to the old version. But it wouldn’t even install under XP, so I knew I had to go the dual-boot route again.

That brings us up to roughly last week. Over the evenings of last week I started making preparations to install a Win98 partition on the new PC, thus allowing me to reinstall my old tried-and-true audio environment. I backed up a few things just in case, I installed Partition Magic 8.0, I located all the install CDs I thought I would need, and I sacrificed a stoat to the dark gods of hard drive safety[1].

My drive setup was such:

  1. C:, a 120 gig hard drive, unpartitioned, WinXP running off it. NTFS file system.
  2. D:, a DVD-Rom drive. Not part of the equation.
  3. E:, a 80 gig harddrive, unpartitioned, containing just data. NTFS file system.
  4. F:, another 120 gig hard drive, unpartitioned, again containing just data (mostly audio). FAT32 file system.

My plan in the beginning was to use partition magic to create a small (10 gig or so) partition at the end of the first 120 gig hard drive, label it G or something, and whack Win98 on there. All received and found wisdom on the subject – including my own past experience with Win2k/Win98 dual-booting – said that the One True Way of doing this was to have Win98 installed first, then put WinXP on afterwards as it wouldn’t choke or wipe the previous OS, which Win98 would. However, I’d already set up the new PC with WinXP, and I had untold tools at my disposal to achieve what I wanted, in the way of disk partitioning and managing tools, boot loaders, and all manner of arcane wizardry.

Can you feel the “however” coming?

However, all was not to be so simple. Already having my C drive installed with WinXP I decided to create a new partition on this drive and install Win98 to it, allowing some boot loader or other to handle the switching. I created the partition following sketchy instructions from Partition Magic, and ended up with a FAT32 partition that I could do nothing with. I tried to install Boot Magic, which then vanished onto the new partition and wouldn’t then allow itself to be configured. Turns out that you need to put Boot Magic on a partition of its own that resides in the first 8 gig of the hard drive, or it won’t be visible to configure it. Doh.

How now to get rid of Boot Magic? It was installed on a partition that I couldn’t do much with, plus it had fiddled the Master Boot Record so that it overrode any other boot instructions. Well it turned out that I had to install the Windows XP Recovery Console from the install CD and run a mystic script called fixmbr (fix master boot record). This got rid of Boot Magic’s boot instructions allowing to completely get rid of the Boot Magic installation.

After a couple of evenings of trying different combinations of new partitions, tweaked boot configs, ancient mystical runes and sacred Māori chants, I was eventually forced to admit that I might not be able to install Win98 after the fact and may after all need to wipe my first drive and perform a full reinstall. Take off and nuke the site from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure.

So I backed up all the stuff that was laying around in my XP install that wasn’t OS or programs, and prepared to wipe. Some things I backed up to F:, some things I backed up to E:. The reason for this escapes me now – it may have been down to available space. This done, I crossed everything crossable, did a tiny rain dance, merged all existing partitions on the first drive back into one, and girded my loins in preparation for rebooting to the Win98 install CD.

On doing so, it did as expected for a while. It told me that I could install Win98 to the C: drive, but doing so would of course delete ALL my data – ALL OF IT! ARE YOU SURE? OH THE HUMANITY! – and format the drive to its own preference of file system (FAT32, if I recall correctly, which I may not).

“Fine!” quoth I. “Go right ahead!” It did. It was at this point that I felt the vaguely familiar thrill of knowing there was a completely clean hard drive underneath me. 120 giggle-bytes of pure zeroes stretching out as far as the drive-heads could see. (It may just be me who experiences that, and I may be a terminal geek. No matter. Our story continues.)

The drive formatted, the Win98 installer continued on its merry way to the next screen… but no further. “Please insert the Windows 98 boot disk or CD-ROM” or something to that effect, repeating over and over, and I was stuck. Screaming “But the CD is in there! You were just running from it!” had very little visible effect, and at this point my patience with Win98 – already worn so thin you could read the small print on the back of a box of painkillers through it – finally evaporated into thin (and by now, blue) air.

I recalled then that – as mentioned earlier – my chosen audio software would in fact install into Windows 2000. I could go this route, and leave Win2k as a clean install, spending the rest of the time in a normal WinXP installation on another partition. In effect, just swapping Win98 for Win2k, but keeping the rest of the plan the same. Out came the Win2k install CD, and onto the machine it went.

For the sake of my own sanity, I must draw extra attention to this step of the overall process. Why? Because it was the first thing I had attempted in almost a week that actually worked as expected. Phew. Thank $deity for that. Not everything is out to get me. Perhaps it will be OK after all.

I booted into my fresh new Win2k install on C:, now the sole occupant of the first 120GB drive, and all appeared to be well. I believe I even let out a small “w00t!” of joy.

It was around this time that my 80GB data drive (formerly E:, now reallocated to D:) spontaneously committed seppuku and lost its file allocation table. For no apparent reason. At all. None.

I’m not proud to say it, but there may have been tears at this point. Remember that I’d been spending all my spare time doing nothing but glare at progress bars and getting steadily further away from the goal. It was heartbreaking. That data drive held all the images, word docs, lyrics, PSDs, videos, installers, and other random cruft that I had accrued over something like 10 years of PC ownership. Honestly, there were GIFs on there that I first copied off a friend that long ago (I know this for a fact because we used to sit and watch some of them colour cycle when we used to acid together, and that was a good 10 years ago).

Still with me? Well the story does take a turn for the better here.

We’re at Sunday morning just gone (the 29th) by this point, and it was then that I remembered that I have access to a very handy program called “Active Un-Delete”. I installed this life-saving utility and Partition Magic into my new Win2k environment, and ran the former on the ailing D drive, which was fortunately still visible though showing as “Unformatted” in PM. I set Un-Delete to scour the first 20gig of D: using its low-level scan, and within an hour lo and behold it had found the missing partition information. I then created a new partition on the first drive (naming it “saviour”) and recovered all my lost data to this new location. It took another hour or two to reformat D: and put all the data back where it belonged, but I got there.

From that point up until now, nothing has yet gone wrong. Having put all my data back where it should be, and having taken a second backup of most of it, I wiped the “saviour” partition, created a new partition for WinXP, and installed it. This morning I was running Windows Update on that install and letting things settle in a bit.

The plan remains as before except that I now don’t intend to use a boot manager to switch between WinXP and Win2k, rather I will simply use Partition Magic’s PQBoot utility to set whichever one I want to be the active partition, and reboot. It does of course mean that these two partitions will never be able to see each other and will live their lives like one man playing twin brothers in a 60s comedy – always dashing into the room just as the other nips out the French windows saying “Dash it, just missed him.” But that’s OK, I have 2 other physical drives for putting all my shared files on, so the 2 OSes don’t need to be able to see each other.

Of course, I still have to get my recording software up and running acceptably in Win2k – something I’ve never done before.

Please wish me luck – I fear I’m going to need it – and thanks for reading. It’s been cathartic.
–c.
[1] May not actually be true. In retrospect, perhaps I should have.

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