Who would have thought that upgrading hard drives could be such a nightmare? The easy part was installing a new 400 GB drive in my desktop and moving all my data to it. The hard part was upgrading my 40 GB tablet hard drive to a 100 GB one. I thought I’ll save myself a lot of trouble and bought a PATA adapter for a notebook hard drive, so that I could just install the hard drive in my desktop. Then I thought I’ll grab an image of the drive, switch the new hard drive in and restore the image to it. So much for the idea. That all worked well except that the drive was no longer bootable after I installed it back in the tablet. Long story short, I got a good ride around Windows trying to resolve the issue. I even saw the warning once that my Windows installation was not genuine…

If you ever want to try upgrading a notebook hard drive yourself, this worked for me: Plug the notebook hdd in the desktop, use ntbackup to backup all the stuff. Plug the new notebook hdd in the desktop, partition it, format it and restore the data from the backup. Install the new drive in your notebook. Boot with a Windows XP CD and go into the Recovery Console. Run fixmbr, fixboot and bootcfg /rebuild. Boot your system with the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. Note, that I used one that SP2 slipstreamed. Run chkdsk /f. Then run diskpart and set the partition active. Diskpart seems to do quite a bit more than just marking the partition as active, because when a different program did that, it still wouldn’t boot.

You could probably make your life easier if you run diskpart while the drive is still in your desktop…

Having finally upgraded the hard drive on my tablet, I decided I could make good use of my old tablet hard drive and stick it in my girlfriend’s laptop instead of her 2002 30 GB drive. This time I had the steps to making it work down, so it went quite a bit faster.

With the new space on my desktop, I burnt myself a Vista B2 x64 DVD and installed it. I am honestly not that impressed. From reading about Vista, I had expected Aero to be something great, but all I can see it does is making the frames of my windows transparent. I also encountered the expected driver issue. It’s going to take me a lot of time though to be able to find settings again. I tried unsuccesfully to see (changing would be better of course) the details of my wireless LAN connection, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Besides that, the performance seems to be reasonable for a beta version. I’ll stick with XP until Vista RTMs though.