Yay me!

[swestrup]

I think I've got this dang compooter thing working at last. I've managed to restore my main C: drive and I appear to have all of my files and programs intact. The only thing I don't have is all of my microsoft updates, which I am downloading now (I have to upgrade to at least SP1 before I can finish restoring my files, since that's when they introduced support for >137GB drives.)

So, I'm going to let the machine work away at downloading and upgrading stuff for a while, and check back in 90 minutes or so. If that all goes well, then I'll see about installing the rest of my RAM and finally doing the upgrade to SP2.

For now though, I'm quite happy its working as well as it is. Even if everything tanks when I go SP2, I now know what I have to do to get the system back to this state, and it would only take a couple of hours from a blank drive.

Comments

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

It's truly astounding how short-sighted people can be when it comes to hard drive sizes. How in the world could Microsoft not have seen in 2001 that there'd be hard drives bigger than 137 GB in the near future? You could already have bought 60 or 80 GB drives at the time.

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

That is because (as we all know) 640K must be enough for everyone ;-)

[swestrup]

This time it wasn't microsoft. Whoever thought up the LBA spec for talking to ATA drives didn't think up a way to handle greater than 137 GB drives. Someone had to invent LargeLBA for that...

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Ah. Well, they were cutting it pretty fine with the new spec, all the same. Why don't they just move to flat 128-bit addressing or something, and stop it with the ugly stopgaps?

[swestrup]

My guess it was because 1) they were dealing with an existing hardware bus and 2) they had to be backward compatible with a gazillion existing drive controllers.