Do you remember the scene in the movie Jurassic Park where the Velociraptor is trying to push its way into a room full of people, and the hero and heroine are pushing against the door to shut it out, but they can't lock the door because the locks are controlled by a computer and the computer needs to be booted up from scratch?
Well, that's how I've felt today doing a cold installation of Windows XP. It did not go smoothly for several hours. The problem was my big D drive (300 GB). The manufacturer, Maxtor, told me to disconnect it during the installation. So did the local shop that built the machine and installed the drive. So I disconnected it. Result? Windows setup went into a loop where it kept formatting the C drive and installing the same files over and over. And over and over. Each iteration took 45 minutes to an hour. I was going to pack it in and just take the thing to the shop tomorrow. Then I tried one last thing -- the opposite of what I was told. I reconnected all drives. Result? Windows proceeded to install just fine. At first it could not recognize all of that big D drive. But Maxtor had a little exe file to alter XP's registry to allow it to recognize the drive. I ran it and Voila! There it was, in all of its glorious 300 gigabytes, along with my 35.5 GB of photo files (the same files that I spent 12 hours backing up to a Flashtrax over USB 1.1.) Still, it was configured in FAT 32 rather than NTFS. So I transferred those 35.5 GB of photo files to C, then tried running a cryptic Windows command line script to convert D to NTFS. Again, asking for help gave me the wrong advice. Doing it the "wrong" way, the drive was converted to NTFS within a few seconds. And not a file was lost. It looks like the only casualty of the day is that I may need a new modem. Well, they're only $25 or so. The old one is a V90. I went to the manufacturers web site to look for any software, but the web site said that XP needs a V92 modem. At first XP couldn't recognize the modem. I removed it, booted up, shut down, reinstalled it, and booted up again. Windows didn't recognize it as a modem, but I did get a Windows 2000 driver installed for it and got it working -- as you can see from this message. And while the case was open I put in a USB 2 card. Woohoo. What speed. I have one printer installed, and need to do two more plus my card reader. Then it's software. But it's been a long day, so this may be it for now. Thanks to Rob S, Tom C, Shel, and Wheatfield for advice and hand-holding. Now if CS 2 will just work okay. The Velociraptors are pacing outside the door, safely locked out. G'night all. Joe
