Proper geek needed - 0x490 system file integrity in dual boot

paddyrg

I'll ask packard bell nicely. Actually if I don't get any joy, I think I may have my old non-OEM (full retail!) XP Pro disc somewhere, that would probably do for Avid and I can do most of my wheeling and dealing in Mint. Looks like the mobo supports sata, so drive swapping should be painless :-)

I have a dropbox as well, but it's 2GB compared with 5GB from sugarsync. SS also has a nice android client, and keeps 5 versions of everything, which is nice. I use it when the gaffer works on his big Mac thingy, and I have to either use his mac lappy, or my far-preferred pc - in 3 different locations, then he takes his lappy on tour, we're still in sync with the purchase orders and budgets etc. I do like it!

paddyrg

For those of you who are still reading, all solved more or less.

Luckily I did manage to find the Vista OEM recovery DVD's whilst looking high and low for my XP retail disk. I expected them to have aged and decayed by now, but they worked... So I trotted down to Maplin as opposed to spending a couple more days waiting for a replacement drive by post. Luckily they had a Seagate SATA 2 750GB for under £50, which is more than online prices with postage, but was all of 40 seconds walk away. With a radio-sync clock I bought at the same ti,e for a tenner, it was under £60, and I became eligible for a screwdriver set "worth" £15 for free. Actually it's not bad - 6 real chrome vanadium screwdrivers, some crappy plasticine mini ones, a ratchet-with-bits one which I admit is handy for funny shaped bits/security heads, and a pair of pliers and a snips. But free, and worth it.

SATA drives are just so *easy* to replace, I spent more time treying to unplug my network cable from the back of the box than replacing the drive. I gave the old one one last chance, and it spun up just fine, and made a show of my cavalier attitude to replacement - but I think as it heated up it failed again, and this would explain the increasingly bizarre behaviour from it when it would cool down when I booted from CD, and seem to recover, only to vanish again later.

So, a quick and easy fix - except... remember that repair disk was OEM from Packard Bell? Blimey it was pre-installed with so much crap, and it took forever to sack it all. Every programme one at a time via control panel, each one asking if I was *sure* I wanted to uninstall a 90-day trial of Norton 2007, or office 2007, etc. That took longer than the reimaging from DVD did. Then quickly on with MSE, as good a free and light AV as any currently. Then sorting through the 112 Windows Updates deemed important since 2007 - dismissed a few of them, but I know they'll nag me next time I start up, and in the end I will relent and have some functionless fixes for bits of the OS I never use.

Next, on with Mint 9 (as I had v9 disc to hand) - so much more pleasant to install than my big OEM guff removal in Vista. Still need to populate it with stuff I like, although much of it is there, waiting for me. Annoyingly GRUB likes to default to Mint, although I think I've fixed this - it's a line default=x where x is a 0-based position-based list entry. With the rescue partition, linux and linux recovery, and some mem test things that appeared from who knows where, for me x=5.

And that's that. Thank you for all your helps, everyone - I'm glad in a way the drive was failing and I wasn't just being stupid misunderstanding about MBR/MFT/blah. There was nothing that could be done, so £50 and a lot of configuration time and it should be good for another few years in honesty, or rather until the next component dies, but it was very clean and happy looking inside, so I can sit it out a while longer :-)

BTW for those who haven't tried Mint, it's like Ubuntu but easier, and is the 4th OS behind Windows, OSX and Ubuntu Linux. Whilst that leaves it a tiny player, it's still well enough supported, easier than getting OS2Warp help, or even BeOS to be honest. And it is easy. :-)