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

Scandisk finished at 7:22 a.m. There were no errors found. The new hard drive, physically is perfect. Time to think about all this, and search the Internet for more ideas. Found a few ideas: Try setting the new drive to AUTO instead of USER and LBA. Also noted an issue with Windows 98 and Hard Drive caching, and there is a patch available for it from Microsoft, which will delay shutdown to allow very large hard drives to write all their cache correctly to the drive.

At least, through all this, I never had to reopen my computer case to physically switch the 2 drives from master and slave. Bios settings allowed me to virtually do this. If I had, It surely would have led to more problems and many frustrations.

Now for some heavy labour: Install Windows IDE Hard Drive cache package on old drive. Try booting off new drive. “Sector Not Found”. Abort will cancel and cause it to restart. I do two “Ignore”s instead and it starts up, but with the mouse not working! A scandisk (using the keyboard to start it up) shows no errors. Install the Hard Drive cache package on the new drive. Reboot. Still two “Sector Not Found” errors which I ignore and still no mouse. I go to the System Information accessory, and see it says that the PS/2 Compatible mouse has a problem with the message “System Failure: try Changing the driver for this device. If that doesn’t work, see your hardware documentation”. I go to “Add New Hardware”. The device is in the list. I pick it to get installed and it says “This device is already installed, but it has a problem. To view properties for the device, and to see the problem and proposed solution, click Finish”. I do that and it says “Device Status: This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the file vmouse.VXD that loads the drivers for the device (Code 8). To fix this problem, run Windows Setup again using your Windows CD-ROM”. I figure the VXD file is bad. I go to c:windowssystem. I rename VMOUSE.VXD to VMOUSBAD.VXD. I Copy VMOUSE.VXD from my old drive. It has the same size and date and time. Reboot. Still the two “Sector Not Found” errors and no mouse, so that didn’t fix it. Try their solution: Of course, my machine was an OEM installed computer. I don’t have a Windows CD, but I do have the CAB files with the install images. Go to Driver, Update Driver, Use the cabinet files on my machine. It says the best driver is already installed for this device. I manually select the Standard PS/2 Port Mouse. It says “Windows has finished installing the driver you selected for your hardware device. Restart?” I select “Yes” and the machine freezes during shutdown. I press the Reset button. “Scandisk cannot read from last cluster”. I let scandisk run. I still get the two “Sector Not Found” problems which I ignore and no, the mouse still does not work.