IT Bytes

My annoying drive with XP went wrong AGAIN. That’s the 3rd time now and it really seems ill. I ran CHKDSK and it froze so I think the disk is an ex-disk. However, this presented a problem. I’d sensibly installed Vista on a separate disk but it still uses the dodgy disk to host the boot manager so Vista won’t boot without that. After a lot of reading about BCD Editors and the like and finally removed the ill disk. Sure enough the PC couldn’t find a system. So I put Vista DVD in and went into the repair. This is quite a worrying process as it asks a lot of language questions as if it is going to install it. Happily once past the language screen you get the chance to repair. One of the options is to examine start-up problems so I did that. It realised that the bootmanager was missing and told me it had repaired the problem. I rebooted and still no system. Hmm, I was about to give up when I tried to boot from my data disk. Aha, Vista had put the bootmanager onto the "wrong" disk but after telling my BIOS to look there for a system everything seems fine! I’ve checked that my faulty disk is still within it’s warranty so if worse comes to worse I’ll send it back. Although then I’ll be faced with how to add XP to an existing Vista setup <gulp>. Then again if I get a new graphics card perhaps I won’t need XP.