My wife and I are just about done with our garage update and I planned on doing a tie in to my final mControl article. I was about to start writing my article this Friday when my neighbor across the street asked me to take a look at his family computer. I am not going to get into detail but the hard drive was bad. Easy enough, right? Just replace the hard drive and Restore from the last backup. Uh, it is my neighbor. He does not have WHS. Crap. So much for my article.
Background
I have been busting my ass trying to get the garage tile installed, new cabinets hung and my PC bench completed when my neighbor asked me if I could look at his computer. He has a four year old eMachines PC and the hard drive is bad. On Thursday he had BB look at it, it was toast, but could not afford their costs so he brought it home.
This is the perfect opportunity to try out my PC bench. After checking the hard drive I sent him back to BB to get a EIDE 500GB HD and I am now going to reload Windows and every flippin’ application and get him up and running. Get Windows Home Server Patrick. Seriously.
Equipment Needed:
One PC with crapped out hard drive
Three Beers (Optional, but pretty much required in my case)
Replacement hard drive
Windows Installation Disk
Two hours to stick your thumb up your butt while it formats and loads
Installation
Installing from the Windows XP SP2 CD sucks, but you already knew that.
Configuration and Setup
Every single preference, option, setting and bookmark needs to be rebuilt, but you already knew that.
I am going to let him deal with the SP3 updates and Framework downloads.
Conclusion
I did not get to write my article but my neighbor has a working PC again. It would be nice if I could just buy people WHS systems as gifts. It would save us all so much time. Oh, by the way, my sister just IM’ed and is telling me her Buffalo NAS just went into Emergency Mode (EM) so now I will have to deal with that! Get a WHS. Seriously.
If you do not have Windows Home Server backing up your systems each night, please do it soon. Seriously.
See you next Friday night.
Timothy Daleo
Tim, to make new installs a lot faster, slipstream SP3 into a Windows XP image and copy it to a USB stick, following the instructions on the net for prepping the stick using Vista to install Windows 7. Once the stick is prepped, you can copy any operating system onto it.
Larry,
Could you send me an email with the detailed instructions and links? I would like to keep a USB drive around in case other neighbors find out!
Tim
daleo 3 @ yahoo . com (remove spaces)
Even better, make friends with someone that has access to Microsoft TechNet (many in IS/IT at major companies have access) and can download ISOs of any recent (and most older) version of Windows with just about any ServicePack already slipstreamed in my Microsoft…
You'll still need your own license keys though.
BTW, assume you tried all the usual methods of "motivating" the old hard drive Tim? (my personal favorite being to throw it into a ziplock and then into the freezer a couple hours…) If you're lucky, you can get it working for a little bit and can try to clone it to the new drive and avoid all the re-installation/configuration.
I read about the freezer trick recently. Not quite ready for that, but get this:
The neighbor comes over last night and tells me his two year old turned the PC on its side and poured a soda in the fan vent while the system was on. I am through with tech support for him!
He could always make a popsicle…