Last night, my Hitachi Deskstar died on me. This was the main disk in my Sun Ultra 20 Workstation, running Windows XP 64.

This morning, I tried to investigate how much the disk would still co-operate and at that moment it made all kind of strange noises and throwing around error messages. So I bought a new SATA disk at the PC store and installed a fresh OS on it.

Naturally, I didn’t have backups of some files that were on the disk, so I tried to copy them from the dying disk. with a lot of screeching noises and retries, the file was copied succesfully.

using “DriveImage XML” I managed to create a full image-file of the disk on the new disk; the next step was to write the image-file to a new partition on the disk, make it bootable. Switch some parameters in the BIOS, a reboot and…… no go. Windows had it’s “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices” messed up and was pointing to old boot devices.

After doing some reading, I downloaded a Windows 98 boot disk and did an “fdisk /mbr”. This particular version of fdisk as the side-effect that it writes a little bit too much zeros to the MBR. As as result, windows XP has to rebuild its table with MountedDevices, resulting in my old installation running on the new partition. Yohooo!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.