TJOtala

Over the Holiday BreakChristmas Break I decided to take care of some overdue maintenance on my home PC, a Dell Dimension 8400. The primary system disk (160GB SATA) that had shipped with the PC was consistently showing up in the WinXP Event Log with I/O errors during paging operations. Meanwhile, the primary data disk (250GB SATA) I had retrofitted into the system kept showing up in WinXP Disk Manager as having errors that would go away only to return next time. Several years of accumulated cruft in the WinXP installation was starting to show, suggesting that it was about time for one of those occasions where WinXP just needs to get re-paved.

Now, I’ve done more than my fair share of PC surgeries over the years, yet little did I know what Dell had in store for me…

The first order of business was to pick up some new SATA disks. I got a 200GB disk to replace the system disk, and a pair of 500GB disks to replace the data disk as a RAID1 array using the built-in features of the Intel 925 chipset on this system. That was the easy part.

Some time ago Dell in their infinite wisdomidiocy decided that you really don’t need the OS installation disks, coz, well, PC hardware never fails, and well, even if it did it’d be time for you to upgrade to a new PC anyway, no? When I first got this PC, I promptly did what any sane engineer would do: I created a “OS Restore” CD and stashed it away in a safe place. Feeling mighty good about myself, I popped the new disks into the system and booted off the restore CD. Everything goes just fine until about 3/4 into the WinXP installation it fails, claiming that it is missing some files that are absolutely needed.

Great. Just bloody great.

No amount of futzing with the so-called OS restore CD resulted in happiness. A quick check of the Dell support pages for this system reveals that it’s out of warranty and therefore the only helpful suggestion available is to call Dell support to grovel for installation disk. By now I’m in no mood to be calling Dell’s support lest I risk telephonizide.

I dug around the ‘net a bit to discover that Dell PCs ship with a hidden partition that can be used to restore the system to the state in which it left the factory. Only two problems with that brilliant idea:

1. If your original disk is busted beyond repair, that partition is not going to do you any good
2. If your original disk is still in OK shape and you happen to be the paranoid type (like me), you’re not about to blow away a marginal yet functional disk until you’re damn sure you’ve transitioned to a shiny new disk

My case was the latter, and I wasn’t about to blow the marginal disk away just yet. I wanted to first dupe the old disk onto a new disk, then blow away the dupe with the “factory state”.

I quickly find a good dozen or so free and paid disk cloning software packages that claim to be able to dupe any disk. Turns out that many of them assume that either you bought the shrinkwrap box that presumably comes with a floppy disk, or that you can create one at will.

Who has floppy drives anymore these days? I certainly haven’t had one since late 1990s.

Briefly I flirt with the idea of turning some of my many USB flash drives into bootable floppy-like devices. I’ll spare you the painful details except to note that – surprise, surprise – it involves floppy disk boot images, and the apparent inability of the Dell BIOS to recognize bootable USB flash drives even if one hit them squarely in the forehead.

Some of the better ESD packages wisely come with ISO images for burning bootable CD-ROMs. This looks more promising.

After the first few failed attempts with various packages I realize that this PC’s default chipset configuration leaves the SATA controller in AHCI. As it turns out, most of those software packages don’t know jack about AHCI and therefore cannot find the disks at all, let alone dupe one to the other. So I flip the BIOS to the legacy ATA mode – lo and behold, there be a duped disk here, cap’n!

I fire up the system with the newly minted dupe and try to access the “factory restore” partition. No joy. No joy despite finely timing my Ctrl+F11 exactly at the right time. Then I discover Dan Goodell’s (how’s that name for irony, eh?) page on restoring the restore partition itself. I manage to create a bootable CD-ROM with all the necessary tools and run the little analysis/recovery tool which tells me everything is now kosher. Brimming with joy I reboot the system and attempt the restore again, only to be rewarded with a terse “Cannot restore” message.

What’s it gonna take to catch a break around here, huh?

Just when I was about to break down and trot over to the local electronics store to buy a new copy of WinXP, my wife helpfully pointed out that her Dell laptop did come with a WinXP installation CD-ROM. I guess Dell realized the error of their ways with the more recent products, eh? Maybe there’s still hope for Dell.

Unfortunately the WinXP installation CD-ROM had two problems: one, it had the product key of my wife’s laptop, and two, it lacked the necessary Intel device drivers to support installation on disks addressed in AHCI mode. The instructions for installing AHCI device driver again assumed access to a floppy disk drive. I’m beginning to see a pattern here – it’s a TEAC conspiracy! After I hacked up a new bootable CD-ROM that addressed both problems, I was finally able to re-install WinXP on the new system disk. Rejoice! Time for heavy drinking! Or maybe that should have come first?

The only real problem that remained was applying the 65+ security patches that Microsoft has released since WinXP SP2. Oh, and that the Intel 925 chipset (and the related software) ‘fessed up no knowledge of RAID ability. It wasn’t until I went into the Dell BIOS settings and forced the setting to be “RAID On” (always) as opposed to “Autodetect” that the RAID subsystem sprang into life and I was able to create a RAID1 out of the two 500GB data disks. That whole process was actually pretty painless, except for the half a day it takes to format 500GB disks.

Now I just need to migrate the old RAID5 array (3x 250GB PATA disks) I originally had in this machine into another PC, since that RAID card won’t play nice with the Intel chipset enabled in RAID mode.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.