Hard Drive Mystery Deepens

As I wrote earlier, I now have two more or less identical 160GB hard drives, both of which refuse to boot when they are the primary hard drive. If I attach the drive as an external (not primary) hard drive, I can read everything on the drive. I've run chkdsk /r on one of the drives, and it gets a clean bill of health.

I thought I might once again try booting to the Windows Repair Console and try some of the rather severe repair options there, like fixmbr and fixboot. Heck, if nothing else, I could do a brand new "bare metal" installation on that drive. But when I tried to boot from the CD-ROM, something odd happened. It displayed the "checking your hardware" message, then went to a blank screen and never finished loading the Repair Console.

I shut the machine off, inserted the (working, will boot) 120 GB last-ditch backup hard drive, and then attempted to boot from the CD-ROM. This time it worked and would go to the Repair Console, not that I actually need it for this drive.

This is very strange. I'm trying to figure out what sort of hardware failure would cause both of the 160 GB drives (from different manufacturers, even) to fail in such a way that WinXP would hang when booting from CD-ROM. I suppose I could contact Dell tech support -- the machine is on an extended service plan -- but I doubt anything that happens over the phone or e-mail or chat with someone in India is going to help. The question is whether I'm patient enough to wait them out until they agreed to dispatch someone to come look at it.

I actually need to open a call with them anyway, because I probably should have the screen replaced on that drive, and the keyboard on the other one. It is more efficient, I would think, to do all of the repairs at once, but I have a feeling that their system will want to treat them as three different calls and thus dispatch either three people or the same person three differen times.

Olympic Coverage

The first week of the Olympics having been while I was on the road, I didn't get to see much of it, but I have been watching the rest of it, and Cheryl comments on some of the things she and I have noticed.

Match Game @ SiliCon

I've been so busy moving cubicles and trying to rebuild my laptop's hard drive that I forgot to mention that I've been invited to do Match Game SF on the Sunday (October 5) afternoon of SiliCon.

kproche and bovil are on the panelist list already on the panelist list because I caught them before they left BASFA on Monday. I will be asking our other regular panelists shortly whether they are attending and if they want to be panelists.

More details when I know about them.