So I borrowed a hard drive from work, resigned to the fact that at least I could crack on with creating a Ghost of a reinstalled XP system last night. I’d already started on the “longer than you realised” list of software I had to reinstall, and drivers that’d need updating.
Plug in the replacement HD and start the XP install, whilst watching Arsenal hold Portsmouth to a draw (only two games to go and we’ll be undefeated for the season). But I quickly got into a Catch 22 situation. At a certain point early in the XP install process, the computer needs rebooting, but despite the XP installer seeing the replacement hard drive, the motherboard BIOS was not, and finding only the XP CD, insisted on beginning the process over again!
I gave up, went away and chilled out watching Gordon Ramsay bemoan another chef on Channel 4.
Then I unplugged everything and decided to check the IDE cable. No difference. Then I changed around where my various drives were plugged into the motherboard. This seemed to do the trick. Very quickly I replaced my temporary new hard disk with my old failed one, and it booted. Hoorah! Next step was to grab a pile of CDRs and get backing up furiously. That hard disk still sounds very dodgy to me, so I wasn’t going to mess about with it for too long.
So the outcome does seem to be that I have dodgy motherboard again, and I’m left in a quandry. I certainly need to buy a new hard drive, but I guess I should also get a new motherboard. Which will almost certainly mean a new processor (not necessarily a bad thing at all), and therefore DDR RAM to replace my PC133 RAM – and I currently have 768MB RAM. So all in all, that’s got to be the thick end of £250 at the very least. On the plus side I get a faster computer.
(Oh and XP has decided that my current computer’s configuration is vastly different to the one I had before, and so should be re-activated, which it refuses to do via the internet).