Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
I know y'all are probably bored to death of my hard drive woes by now, but I'm kind of stumped, and maybe I'm overlooking something obvious. So after I started getting the "hard drive failure imminent" messages (which I'm still getting after 20 or more successful boot-ups), I went out and bought a 200-gig drive from Staples for $40 after rebate (which kind of blows my tiny little mind. I mean, 200 gig! For $40! Rememberwhen it was 500 for $900?) and tried to install it. That's when I discovered that a) my old drive was a SATA, b) the new drive was an ATA, and c) while I have four SATA slots, I have only one IDE slot, and both of my CD-ROMs were currently using it. I sent away to Hong Kong for an adaptor that would allow me to use the new drive with one of the SATA slots, and waited. It arrived, and after a lot of silly jumper cable drama I finally got the new drive recognized (though only when it's connected to the IDE port; the adaptor doesn't seem to work with either the hard drive or the CD-ROMs. Oh well; it was only $7 including shipping). I cloned my old drive to it last night. So yay.
This morning I wake up to a blank, unresponsive screen (the old drive has been freezing up and BSODing me pretty much every time I leave it unattended for more than a couple minutes, though strangely it seems to work fine when I'm actually using it), but after rebooting the new drive is recognized in windows, I get an "boot drive transfer successful" message, and all my files are there. Problem is, I can't seem to boot to it. When I try, I just get that black screen with blinking cursor that you get right before the Windows logo when booting up XP, but it never gets on with it. No error message or anything; it just stays there, veekink und bleenkink und drivink me sane! If I boot up to the old drive instead, I get the "hard drive failure imminent" message, but above that I can read in the S.M.A.R.T. dialogue "[old drive] Status: BAD", "[new drive] Status: OK". Well, that's encouraging, and I'm glad my data is safe, but if the old drive goes kablooey before I can figure out how to boot up to the new drive, I don't see how it's going to do me much good. Advice?
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