I've spent the last 3 days (thankful it's been a long-weekend) installing a new hard drive in my computer. It took a long time to work it out, but it seems the problems that have been plaguing me were to do with a failing hard disk. I went out on Friday and bought myself a new 320 GB Western Digital hard disk. I tossed up between the internal disk, or an external drive, but decided that since I'm replacing one it probably should be internal. The 2nd 250 GB disk would certainly have coped with holding all my data and the external could have been portable, so I'm still not sure that I made the right choice. But the deal is done, and the new drive is installed and everything is working properly again.
Remember...
If your ship doesn't come in ...
Swim out to it.
Jonathan Winters
The upgrade to a new and bigger disk shouldn't, however, have taken me 3 days. Initially, I installed the new disk, and got XP to do the format and install the new operating system. After it was installed I used Partition Magic to slice the disk into 3 drives, similar to the drives on my old disk, but bigger. After a full day installing all the software and updates and having everything just so, I did a Norton Ghost image dump of the C drive, and the computer wouldn't boot. I had a nasty "Error loading OS" message. Using Hiren's Boot CD, I was able to get back into XP, and after fiddling with some of the tools on Hiren's Boot CD I actually made the drive impossible to get back into.
It's been another nightmare for computers in my house but persevenance won out again! Finally, I did a new install with the Windows XP disk, re-formatting the c drive, and after the install it all worked again. Then I had my fingers crossed while I restored the Ghost image (this was at 2 am this morning), and THANK GOD!, XP was running properly again and I didn't have to go through the hassle of reinstalling all the software.
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