The initial reformat and reinstall went OK, but during the Windows Update->Reboot cycle I got a Blue Screen of Death and things went downhill from there.

My SATA refused to boot. Thinking this could simple be a corrupt MBR problem I booted from my XP CD into the recovery console, tried FIXMBR and FIXBOOT and restarted. I got the same problem – invalid system disk – an decided to reformat again completely. Two hours town the pan so far, but what the hey.

No deal – I still can’t boot from SATA, so I waded through the BIOS options, resetting to safe defaults and going from there, and still my SATA won’t fire up. I eventually removed the Work drive to a safe place and reformatted my backup drive – a 250GB PATA that’s normally in a removable mobile rack – to boot from. This went OK, and I installed Windows, Office and all the combined updates for both.

What’s annoying is that the SATA drives themselves are absolutely fine, mounting in Windows no problem – I just can’t boot from the damned things. I’ve tried all three that I own, two 120s and a 250GB, and they all respond the same. No booting.

I still needed a backup drive, so I plonked down £9.98 on a SATA mobile rack and reformatted the 250 SATA for use as a backup. The idea is that I copy all the files over from C: and D: (now partitions on the 250 PATA, rather than individual SATAs) using SyncToy 2.0 and yank it to store in a safe place. I originally had both my work drive and backup drive encrypted with TrueCrypt, but I just don’t want to push my luck right now.

So now I he a pair of 120GB SATAs sat doing nothing. I could possibly set them up in a simple striped RAID0 config so store my work on, then reformat the PATA as one big lump, but do I really want to go through all that hassle? It’s not as if I need the space.

Sigh… Bloody computers.