My Windows XP Media Center bugbox is acting like it wants to crash again—for the second time in 2007. So I’ve got it running the disk check, which would suit me better if it didn’t seem to be stalled partway through the file data check. I’m letting it chew on that to see if it will get moving again, and meanwhile my internetting will be done on the surprisingly trusty old laptop with its embarrassingly small amount of installed RAM.
As with any Media Center PC, the only copy of the OS I have with which to rebuild the system in the event it does crash, is on a recovery partition on the main hard drive. Which means merely replacing this apparently failing drive won’t do me any good, even with nearly all of my personal data stored, this time, on other physical drives. Unless there’s a way to transfer the recovery partition’s contents to a new drive, I’ll either have to buy a new copy of Windows (and MCE doesn’t appear to be available except with a Media Center PC) or a new computer (which almost certainly means Vista, which I’m not ready for).
We shall see what we shall see. I did make semi-regular backups, of the registry as well as of actual files, but I’m not ready to have to go through losing even a small amount of personal data so soon after the last time. I tried to get the system to let me move the “Documents and Settings” folder tree off of the C:\ drive but it wouldn’t allow it, so a bunch of my Firefox stuff, for example, is stuck there, waiting for the crash.
Dammit.
Update: Well, I’m back on my bugbox. It never did finish the disk check but the first spot where it stalled it did fix something, and it seemed to correspond to what killed my attempt to backup “Documents & Settings” from Safe Mode previously. But I’m still hugely gun-shy about this thing. I have to wonder whether having the Media Center capabilities is worth not being able to replace an untrustworthy hard drive.
Then again, if the worst happens, I’ll have to replace the hard drive and install a different version of XP on it anyway.
