July 19, 2003
Geh.
Way past my bedtime. I hate Windows. I hate plain ol' 2-GB-limited FAT filesystems. Right now I'm hating PartitionMagic, even though it was looking quite cool for a while (at least I think my current problems are the fault of Partition Magic). Things were going great, and then poof - display drivers gone, some files MIA, wireless drivers gone. Now, after reboot # 5000 (it's a damned good thing I stopped playing the 'drink on reboots' game) I've got duplicate devices coming out of my ears and I'm still stuck at 640x480.
Geh.
And I'm supposed to deliver this thing, upgraded to XP and all, at 9:30 this morning. :-P
Ok, reboot 5001. What on earth went wrong???
(That was 2 a.m.)
Follow-up:
I never did figure out exactly what caused the problems, but I think it was due in part to the incompleteness of PartitionMagic's DriveMapper function. It's nice in that after you merge two partitions, it'll go through the registry and .ini files and change the old drive letter to the new drive letter/path. But it only edits registry key data not key names. The problem is that some of the keys were named for the location of the resource they managed. This involved some shared libraries which I suspect caused the driver wonk.
Anyway, I was only 30 minutes late with the machine, got about 3 hours of sleep, and we're all good now.
BTW, if you ever do an upgrade from Win98 to WinXP Pro on a 933MHz machine, don't trust its estimated install time of 72 minutes. It was closer to 120. At least half of that was spent "preparing to install." I couldn't help but think of Spaceballs.
Hail Skroob!
