Tag Archives: xp

XP migration disapointing

Personal,

Over the weekend I decided it was time to finally replace the PC that had been our main workhorse for the last 3 to 4 years. What prompted it was a month or so ago two of the three DIMM slots on the motherboard went bad leaving 256mb to work with. That wasn’t going to cut it with everything that goes on for work so I’ve switched to using the laptop for now. It’s got plenty of speed but hooking up all the extra stuff gets old everyday. So I headed out Saturday to pickup some new parts… I’ll say it now I should have waited.

I last pieced together a machine in 02/03, I think, when everything was IDE and DDR wasn’t near mainstream. My have things changed. Instead of shopping on the internet I went to a local shop and got a new motherboard, processor, and memory. Then went back to the local Circuit City for a power supply… should have thought of that one. So after using GParted to copy the drive to a spare for testing… that software rocks !!! I started in with the new stuff.

The first problem I had was getting the new board to reconize an IDE drive, as it has only one IDE connection. Fiddling with BIOS settings didn’t seem to help. So since the new board was geared to SATA went back and picked up a drive, and a 3.5 USB enclosure for the old one, and figured I migrate that way. Boy was I wrong.

It’s now late on Tuesday and I have just now been able to “attempt” to have the XP Pro CD recognize the new SATA drive. I should have known better than to assume after all these years migrating would be as simple as copying a drive, letting windows repair the install, and then away we go. This could be the “straw that breaks the camels’ back” with me and forking out $$$ for an OS. After a bit of googling the last two days I know now exactly what I need to do, unfortunately getting there might take a minor miracle.

The short of it is something like this. XP does not have SATA drivers on the CD you have to load them from a floppy during boot. After a considerable amount of searching I found what should be the correct drivers for the board I have but when downloading them from Intel’s site… no go. Intel has good instructions don’t get me wrong. But drivers are a quirky beast and it seems I’m not having luck finding the write ones. Not to mention putting them on a floppy, I haven’t used a floppy since 2001. I have one internal floppy drive that works and only seems to work with one cable. Moving that between two systems just to find out the drivers don’t work took a few hours tonight. So I’ll give it a rest for now.

BTW – Ubuntu loaded without a hitch. Oh I could go to Vista, it will recognize SATA drives, but I paid my $200 for XP Pro a while back as well as XP Home. If it wasn’t for work I wouldn’t need it… maybe I’ll just have the company fit the bill for a new machine and save me the headache.

We’ll see.

Dual booting easier than I thought

Technology, ,

Yesterday was a long day filled mosting with testing applicaions for work. Not what I had envisioned for a Saturday but time is a premium these days. So what does that have to do with dual booting…. well a few weeks ago two of the three DIMM slots on the desktop I use for work went bad which cut the memory to 256mb. To be more efficient I loaded XP on a spare laptop drive and started using it. Yesterday for some reason I got tired of swaping out the drives, as this is my personal laptop that runs Ubuntu, and decided I should just setup a dual boot system if I’m not going to replace the desktop any time soon. So I did and it was easier than I thought.

A quick google pointed me to an endless number of posts on how to set up a dual boot system. What was a little different for my situation was I wanted to put XP on the drive Ubuntu was already on and I didn’t want to reload XP but copy the partition. Wouldn’t you know on the first page of my search results pointed me to this post which was exactly what I was looking for. The key would be resizing and moving the partitions, the artical suggested using GParted which turned out to be the perfect tool. In the past I have not had much need for using a partition manager so doing this type of process was a little new.

Moving and resizing partitions on the 60GB drive Ubuntu was on was the first order of business so I downloaded and burned the GParted Live CD. I put the CD in the drive and booted, following the instructions, and I was in business. Making space was nothing more than dragging the mouse on a bar graph to set the new size of an existing partion, making room for Windows. So were /home on Ubuntu was 40GB it’s now 20, with the other 20 being for XP. Setting the new partition to be ntfs was just a couple clicks. The article commented about creating one formatted as FAT32, for sharing data, but for me that is all on a usb drive and not necessary. Once that was done copying the (c:\) partition from the Windows drive, connected to the laptop via usb, was a simple as copy and paste, All that took about 5 minutes of clicks and checks and 15 minutes of the application working, and me waiting.

So far with a total of about 20 – 30 minutes worth of work it came down to booting both partitions. The Ubuntu partition loaded as usual, Grub was not changed so their was really no reason that would be a problem. The trick would be to get XP to boot. First would be to fix boot.ini on the XP partition so it knew where the OS was on the new drive, that’s where using the XP CD to “Repair” an installation would fix the problem. This page on Microsofts support site told me everything I needed. Including pointing me to how to fix the boot.ini. All in all my total time was about 45 minutes, needless to say I am pleased.

Kudos to James Bannan and APCMag for posting an excellent article. The pics were a great reference and even though I didn’t follow it to a T it was just what I needed to get the job done.