Windows recovery WORKED!!!!!

Hello:

My wife got a new laptop and we cascaded her old desktop to me to use as a music server. All was going well until Thursday AM when the desktop was DOA with Hard Drive issues.

The BIOS could see the drive but the OS couldn't.

I went to Microcenter and bought a new 320GB EIDE drive and plugged it in. I ran the Recovery CD and it partitioned the hard disk and restored the system back to it's original condition (XP Pre-SP2). It was only 20 or 2 CD mounts as it swapped around loading the individual programs from the recovery CDS. I uninstalled (AGAIN) all the junk so I had a vanilla machine.

At this point I was happy I did the new Laptops recovery disks on DVD not CD - less mounts in the case of a total restore.

I pulled down a terabyte or 2 of Microsoft patches - with countless reboots. At this point I have a viable machine. I'm in the process of restoring the music and pictures from the backups (yes it was being backed up - whew) and we'll be good to go.

I bought a USB ATA/IDE drive adapter and the drive is DOA. I have another IDE drive sitting around that it can read, so I know the adapter is working.

I have to give Microsoft their due, everything worked as expected. I was a little hesitant since I wasn't sure the restore was going to work fine or not. While I work in it I haven't done anything with PC's (other than use them ) in 10 years.

Cheers

Jim

Congrats on your success, Jim. Ah, the joys of rebuilding a Windows box. It's usually pretty straightforward, but waiting for the multiple patches and updates to download and install can seem to take forever.

Yes - patches on patches

I just clicked on an another list of patches:
IE8 and what seemed like a dozen security fixes.

It's gone well so far is all I'll say (knock on wood).

Jim

One of the great things about a recovery disk is that it puts the computer back to the state it came from the factory.

One of the bad things is it puts the computer back to the state it came from the factory.

I much prefer a standard install disk because I like to set up my computer different than most people want.

And it's hard to do a repair with a recover disk. But last week I spent most of the day trying to find all the drivers and download them for this laptop.