End of an Era
Were I a superstitious person, I’d be suspicious. The disk problems I described on my primary XP machine a few days ago turned out to be more deeply rooted than originally suspected. I now believe the motherboard was also developing a problem, and it may have contributed to the dead disk. Here’s how I came to this conclusion.
The new drive arrived today. I eagerly hooked it up in place of the secondary SATA drive, believing I could just boot the machine using my copy of Partition Magic’s recovery CD. Then I’d simply examine the defective partition and (hopefully) copy it intact to the new disk. I could then re-arrange partition sizing, copy the extended partition into place on the new drive as well, then shut down. Some quick drive re-swapping would put the newly rebuild 500G drive into place, and all would be well.
But the machine now no longer powers on. This came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, since it hadn’t exhibited a problem before. The power LED on the motherboard is on, the disks seem to spin up, and even the CPU cooler fan comes on. But the actual power indicator never glows, and video does not appear on the monitor. I now suspect the original physical disk itself is fine, but lost data due to the knock-on effect from the (apparently) failing motherboard.
The superstitious aspect of this is that I built the original machine back in June-July 1998. It was originally installed with Windows 98, and has been upgraded in place — the only original parts are the case and floppy drive — ever since. The OS was never re-installed, only upgraded. So it had a 10-year run, nearly to the month.
This said, it’s giving me an opportunity to do a full upgrade. I haven’t seriously modified the hardware in several years (aside from a new video controller and extra memory), so I’m shopping. A new motherboard (Intel DG35EC Motherboard CPU Bundle with Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Processor 3.0GHz) is under consideration, along with 4GB of Corsair RAM and a shiny new SLI video card. It’ll be loaded with a fresh copy of XP, so there’ll be no cruft onboard from prior installations. But I will use the old machine’s case, floppy, and power supply. The legacy lives on. And I have all my critical data, so it’s not a major disaster.
The only thing I’m not looking forward to is re-installing all my applications. But I have several other systems I can use in the meantime, so it’s not a huge priority. And the new machine will be really, really fast.