header image
 

Breaking Perfectly Good PCs Since 2004

winxpdesign.gif

Well I purchased a Gateway CX2610 Tablet PC a few days ago for exactly $350.00 shipped. I thought it was a GREAT deal so I hopped on that bandwagon REALLY fast.

Anywho, this PC comes stock with an 80GB SATA drive. I wanted to make things easy, and this is where the problems started. I consulted with another PC friend of mine, very respected IT person, and presented my idea to him. I wanted to use Norton Ghost to ghost my Toshiba M45′s IDE drive to the Gateway’s SATA drive. In theory, and probably on any other computer except for mine that would normally have worked out fine. But since I’m John Ball and all my perfectly working crap ends up as perfectly broken crap the inevitable was bound to happen.

What do I do about the Tablet PC edition? Blaize had the AWESOME idea (and it really was and still is a great idea) to do a repair install of XP Tablet 2005 onto the original XP Professional installation; because really XP Tablet edition is XP Professional with a few perks.

Blaize started working on the ghosting/re-installation around 7:00 PM on the 28th. Sometime around 11:00 PM on the 28th Blaize called me and said that he couldn’t get the SATA drivers to load from the installation CD. I did some poking around on Google and found the instructions for writing answer files for SATA slipstream drivers.

A hour passes from finding, packaging, and writing the SATA crap. At this point it is no longer SATA drivers, it is SATA crap. I burned the CD and whatdya know? It didn’t work. Back to the chalk board. Some more poking around on Google and I found a program called “n-lite”. N-Lite makes super quick and easy work of making an unattended bootable CD. This program is stupid proof… because I used it and it works. I wish I would have found this program earlier cause I could have went to bed around 1:00 am instead of 4:00 (anybody else have to work at 8:00 am or am I the only one?)

In the end this was a failure. I still had tons of problems even after I got the HDD to clone. Talk about one big PITA (Google it). I ended up reinstalling Windows XP Pro from scratch and doing it that way.

All in all I realized some good pointers to carry with me the next time I do some more PC work:

  • Just cause it sounds like it’ll work in theory doesn’t mean it always will
    (doesn’t mean it always won’t either: check out my antenna mod for this same PC)

  • Even highly respected IT folks sometimes mess up (thanks Blaize :P ) Just kidding, Blaize has saved my butt enough
  • I could have started from scratch in less time it took for me to try to clone the HDD

    ~ by johndball on September 4, 2007.

    • 2 Responses to “Breaking Perfectly Good PCs Since 2004”

    1. That’s funny. I had to fry a few 486 before I learned that they have to go in a certain way! :)

      blaize said this on September 5th, 2007 at 08:36

    2. Good job with the new computer… even though I understood less than half of what you wrote… :)

      nannylauren said this on September 6th, 2007 at 09:05

    Leave a Reply