The Elves are dressed in leather ...

So my seester has run out of room on the old HD and wanted to replace it with a larger one. The current was a 60 gig-ger. We went to Best Buy on the 24th and obtained a new 250 gig-ger to replace it.

Her computer had been acting up so I decided a clean install on the new HD was the correct route rather than attempting to backup/restore the existing image.

After dropping in the new HD and booting the Win-XP-Home CD, the thing booted installed a few drivers and then BSOD'ed. Something about 'pci.sys' yada yada yada. Google was fine enough to tell me I needed to install XP SP2 (service pack 2 for the mere mortals) and all would be excellent.

Having no SP2 disk, I spent a few minutes reading up on slipstreaming SP2 and proceeded to make a new Win XP Home SP2 disk? This requires using an real XP disk, downloading the SP from MS, and downloading a few more utilities to extract a boot image from the XP disk, and create a bootable disk from the existing disk with the SP integrated into it. I got most of my useful info from a site called "theeldergeek" or somethink like that. Very useful that site was.

The truth of the matter is I tried a few things before I took the slip stream approach. None worked. Very frustrating at times. When I finally got around to making my own disk, the first disk would not boot (due to a parameter in Nero Rom which should have been a '4' being a '1'). My bad.

Messing around with computers can certainly be trying. There are several times during the whole process I was reminded of a song by Spinal Tap. Christmas with the devil, in this case the devil is Terry's computer.

Things are now rapidly progressing towards various stages of completion. Next comes the hunt for all the required drivers to get that laptop back in shape for the Happy New Year.