January 2008 Archives

One of my machines at home runs Windows Vista Ultimate.  Until last night, it had an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard in it, a Core 2 Duo 6400 CPU, 2 GB of RAM, an Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, a PCI IDE card with four hard drives attached, a DVD/CD burner, USB mouse, PS/2 keyboard, dual 19" monitors, and 3 SATA hard drives.  In total it has over a terabyte of disk space.

I chose Vista both for the experience it would provide for work as well as the fact that when you have over about 700 GB of IDE/SATA disk space, Windows XP SP2 starts to exhibit data corruption problems due to some kind of static internal area where disk cache data is stored (I lost a ton of files before digging up an obscure KB article on that).  I spent hours trying to fix that issue and couldn't.  The only solution was a hotfix from Microsoft, which they would not give me because I was using an OEM copy of Windows XP Pro.  They wanted me to go back to where I bought the OEM license, which was Newegg.com, which doesn't offer tech support like that.  So I was stuck.  When I went to Vista, I went with a retail license in case it had the same problem.

Unfortunately for me, over a year later, that Asus motherboard decided to give up the ghost.  It apparently killed a DIMM, which I replaced.  Then it pretty much just died entirely, randomly rebooting and crashing even when just sitting at a BIOS screen.  I decided it was time for a (less-expensive) replacement.  I bought an MSI P35 Platinum and 2GB of matching RAM.  Everything else from the old setup would work with this.

Last night, I received the new parts.  I removed the old motherboard and RAM, installed the new ones, connected everything back up, and fired up the system.  It came to life, then immediately choked with a "BOOTLDR is missing" error.  A bit of troubleshooting revealed what I was afraid of. In the install, Vista decided to put the bootloader on one disk, and the rest of Vista on another.  If you reassemble things such that the bootloader disk is in a different location, the machine won't boot.  I booted from the Vista disc and did a repair.  I rebooted again and got the same error.  Another repair later, the system came up and landed at the login screen.  I logged in and found I had no mouse.

Apparently, the new motherboard uses a slightly newer variety of USB2 ports than the old one did, so there were no drivers on the machine or in Vista itself.  I popped in the manufacturer's CD to load the drivers.  Guess what?  The installer was designed to be clicked on, and there were no keyboard shortcuts available!  With no USB ports, I had no mouse and I had no PS/2 mice in the house to substitute.