March 1, 2005
Don’t Die Yet
I have written about my old PC before and how it continues to think about suicide. Well, last weekend I worked all day on Sunday on a project on this computer. In the middle of the day I started getting pop-ups telling me that user.exe in System32 was gone and I needed to re-install it. Learning from last time, I went into System32 and saw that no files were in there alphabetically after T anymore. Oops. The indexes must be corrupt again. Why does this keep happening? I figure the disk is going bad somehow.
So to run chkdsk you have to do it on reboot because C: is in use. Ok, here we go. I haven’t rebooted since July because I am afraid of it not coming back up. So on reboot — it doesn’t come back up. Error messages were flashing too quickly so I used the old camera trick. I took a series of photos to see the message. It said that that disk didn’t have a boot sector. I then used my BartPE tool to go in and it couldn’t see that disk either.
Hmmm. So next I took all the hard drives out to be sure they were still sounding ok. Check. Then I randomly unplugged all the drives except for the one that houses C:. I changed the jumpers to indicate this was a single drive instead of a master. Then I ran the Windows 2000 repair process off of a floppy boot disk. Sure enough, this now could see the drive. I ran a chkdsk and it filled the page with fixes it had corrected.
I reconnected all the drives and rebooted. All good! Whew.
This machine is telling me that it is going to die any day now. So I am on the replacement strategy search. At this point, my plan is to buy a new Dell Dimension 8400. Since I don’t need much in it except for power, it seems like it will cost about $850. Then my plan is to go to the old machine, install Ghost, and build images for the 3 drives that make up 5 partitions. Then what I want to do is boot into the Ghost recovery program on the new machine and restore the images from the old machine, which should recreate the hard drive on the new machine. Think this will work? Anybody ever tried it? This is my best shot I think at getting an upgrade to happen. I can’t just buy a new machine and reinstall all my stuff because I don’t have all the media anymore (my bad). Looking for suggestions if anybody has ever tried a migration like this.
Another option on the machine was one of the Dell PowerEdge workstations. They come with no OS and seem to be priced more around $500. Seems like a good deal.
