… for computers!

New drive arrived from Dell today … Airborne was supposed to get an “Adult Signature” before delivering it.

I guess the driver is an adult … as he must have been the one who signed for it. The drive was shoved between the storm and front door.

Oh well, good thing for Airborne I’m an honest person. I could have just as easily pocked the drive and claimed I didn’t receive it.

The drive installed easy enough, and passed diagnostics … but that’s when things got very interesting…

… because I had a devil of a time getting my backup (1 month old) restored.

I had the original boot disk I used when I created the backup, which was setup to use the laptops port replicator NIC. I put the laptop in the port replicator & pressed the power button … and it didn’t boot. Lights went on, diskette drive seeked, and it powered itself off.

I tried this a number of times … no luck. 🙁

Ok, I can restore using the built-in NIC. So I created a Drive Mapping boot disk with Ghost on Ginny’s computer, and included the correct drivers (I think), but when I tried from the diskette, it could never “Bind” to the adapter.

I worked on this for about 3 hours … with no luck.

I started to reinstall windows from scratch and build the system all over. At least I had the quicken data … and my backup from about a month ago, so I could replicate things somewhat.

While the XP installer was formatting the hard drive, I started to do some Googling and found a web site that had a customized boot diskette builder.

Hmmm, this looks interesting.

I downloaded it and gave it a try … hey, it worked! Wadda ya know!

I proceeded to restore the month old backup (win2k) … and update the quicken data (thank the stars I was able to get that back).

I think I’ll leave the system running Win2K for a while … at least my quicken data can be automatically backed up by my linux system.

The laptop port replicator (APR) appears to be dead. As I’m seriously contemplating a new laptop this year, I’m not going to get a replacement APR until I get the new machine.