Wednesday evening, January 29, 2003 - Wed, 29 Jan 2003

Try again. Found Microsoft Knowledge Base article 316544 said the problem might be because of garbage text in the windows.ini file. I open c:windowssystem.ini and d:windowssystem.ini side-by-side. They are identical and there is no junk in them. This is not the correct solution.

The mouse works fine starting from my old drive, but not from my new drive. Thinking all this time that this is the cause of those two “Sector Not Found” errors, I spend a couple more hours trying to resolve this with many boots between the two drives. Somewhere along the way, a scandisk of the new drive gave me an error near the end of its scan saying: “This drive’s boot area contains important information that is damaged or invalid. This can cause Windows to report the drive’s free space incorrectly or slowly. ScanDisk repairs the boot area by recording the correct values in this area.” I got it to Repair the error and it said “Error was corrected as specified above.” But still, this is very bad. Reboot. Two “Sector Not Found”s and no mouse. Scandisk again. No errors. Reboot again. Go into Bios and change the new drive’s specs from the User defined values (picked up by my Bios’s scan for drives feature) to Mode=AUTO. Reboot. Two Ignores. No Mouse. Scandisk. No errors.

That’s it. I give up on trying to repair the new drive. I will have to wipe it out and set it up again. First, I’ll have to copy all the data I updated in the last two weeks from the new drive back to the old drive. I copy over all my changed files, including my e-mail message store in Outlook Express (which you find via: Outlook Express | Tools | Options | Maintenance | Store Folder). I set up for booting from the old drive. Get new e-mails. Do other stuff.

So now I have everything working again on the old drive with up-to-date data. Only 600 MB space left, but at least it still fit. The new drive has been thoroughly scandisked and there is nothing physically wrong with it. All I can say is I’m very lucky I never wiped out my Operating System on my old drive. It’s time to make sure that everything works fine over the next few days from my old drive and that all the data is up-to-date before wiping out the new drive and trying again.