My old windows computer died last week. Motherboard gave out somewhere. The only thing I use it for is playing games, but that is fairly important and I had a nice holiday week I wanted to spend playing games. So Saturday morning I'm sitting around wondering what to do now. And then I had what turned out to be a very bad idea.

As it happens, my Linux computer is very nearly the same, the motherboard is one model up, the CPU is a few hundred MHz faster and it's got a better video card. So I figure I can pull the hard drive from the Windows machine and put it in the Linux machine and it should run. I've done that before, and while Windows does a couple "fix one thing and reboot" shuffles, it does work.

No dice, hangs during boot cycle. So I pull out my Windows ME install CD and boot with that to check the hard drive. Scandisk says there are disk errors, and then more disk errors, and it quickly becomes clear that it thinks most every file and directory on the disk is busted. Apparently either the BIOS or Windows decided to consider the hard drive a slightly different size or model, and this caused it to have problems reading the disk.

OK, I've seen this before, and there is nothing on the disk I need to keep, and I really want to play some games on this holiday weekend. Fire up Windows installer. That runs scan disk again, so I let it go. And then scan disk reports "there is a problem with long file name for file something or other that can not be corrected, please run Windows scan disk to fix the problem." Err, OK. That is interesting. Reboot and run scan disk again, still says same thing.

Crud, reboot again and go into Dos. Manually delete file. Nope. Switch to big mallet and reformat drive. Run the installer again. Finally it actually gets to installing Windows. Run installer, reboot, run next phase of installer, reboot, run final phase, reboot.

Finally get into windows. Stuck in VGA mode, but first things first, Run Windows Update. Install new version of Windows Update. Rerun Windows Update. Install IE6. Reboot. Run Windows Update. Install one high priority security patch. Reboot. Run Windows Update. Install one high priority security patch. Reboot. Run Windows Update. Install 20 or 30 more security patches. Reboot.

Back into windows. Go to Nvidia web site and get drives. Install drivers. Reboot. Get out of VGA mode. Go get Firefox, Install and run. Go to Creative Labs web site. Grab drivers. Install drivers. Reboot. No sound. Rerun driver install, now it complains it is only a driver update and requires full drivers to be installed first. Remove drivers. Go to Creative Labs web site, find bigger set of drivers and sound utility programs. Install bigger set. Reboot. Reinstall driver update. Reboot. Finally get sound.

And only then could I go back and install the game (Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom) that I wanted to play in the first place. It was right about the time Windows Update grabbed one security update and forced a reboot that I was ready to hunt down and kill Bill.

Jay