Blowing Hot and Cold

By Jerry Pournelle

August 30, 2004

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Bringing Up Wendy

Wendy passed her first smoke test: no blue smoke. She also booted from the Windows XP CDROM—but Windows couldn't find the Serial ATA hard drive. We reset and went to the BIOS and sure enough, the drive was invisible. Pournelle's Law held: The problem was the data cable, which seemed to be seated properly, but wasn't. Reseating the cables solved that problem: The BIOS now saw the disk.

Reboot with the Microsoft XP CD, wait and wait for it to get ready—and, alas, it still couldn't see the Serial ATA drive. Back to the BIOS. Lo! RAID was enabled. Disable RAID. Start over. Voila!

More than a year ago Microsoft sent me a large box of Windows XP Professional disks, each with its own registration number. Naturally they were all the early version of Windows XP, and over time became increasingly obsolete, but I have a good cable modem connection—Adelphia Cable has worked wonderfully well in the past few months—so it hasn't been any great trick to upgrade my elderly Windows XP installations; but there are serious drawbacks to installation with that old an OS.

For instance: Windows XP can't see more than 128 GB of a hard drive. There are several ways around that problem, and I'm going to tell you about them; for now, though, here's another of the silly things I do so you won't have to, and I do not recommend that you proceed as we did the first time.

What we did was ignore the extra disk space, and told Windows XP to format what it could see. Note that Windows XP offers both "quick" and regular formatting. I have always chosen the very slow "regular" format, but when I started to do that, Alex, who was looking over my shoulder, asked why I do it that way. "I've done quick format on dozens of machines and I never saw any reason not to," he said. OK, I told it quick format; but I'm not sure that isn't one of the silly things I do so you don't have to.

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