So my computer repair project took a turn to the strange. When we last checked in with the little adventure, I had recovered and backed up all my data and bought a replacement 160 BG hard drive. Well, then I formatted the drive using an external drive bay, on my Mac running Windows. I made 2 partitions, one at 40GB for the system and another at 120 for my data. I opened my laptop, which is a big pain, and pulled the old drive and put in the new one. I ran Ghost to recover the system partition, but I failed with a mysterious “disk geometry error”. We tried a few things, but ultimately we reformatted the drive in the laptop using an XP install CD. From there were able to restore the C drive from Ghost and the data on the D drive from the recovered files. The weird thing was, the size of the D partition somehow changed from 120 GB to 90 GB and the total size of the drive to 128 GB. Some part of the drive had become orphaned.
Throughout all this, Jeannie was helping me figure out how to proceed, with extraordinary patience. It was slow going, so we’ve been working our way thru HBO’s “
So we have determined that the problem is not with the drive but probably with the machine itself, maybe something to do with the drive controller. I’ve never encountered anything like this before and I don’t really know. So I’m giving up. I sunk a huge amount of time into it and at this point I have a working, if old and creaky, computer so that’s will have to do. Come the new year I will probably look to getting a new laptop. It is mostly likely to be a Mac, so this means I will be leaving Window behind, hopefully for a long time.