Ole Switcheroo
Yesterday I was just sitting around typing on IRC and basking in the glow of my 1247 career points round (double distinguished combat pins and two silver badges) when my computer completely froze up. This was rather odd, but no big deal. Unfortunately upon reboot, I was told that there was an Error Loading OS. I waited a bit and tried again with the same results. Uh oh, sounds like hard drive problems…
I tried searching for a way to diagnose if the main SATA drive had gone bad, but apparently booting from a USB drive doesn’t work that well and I didn’t have any floppies. When I booted from my Vista CD, it found no installation of the OS and said I did not have proper partitions. This I found odd, since my IDE backup HD and my SATA main HD only have one partition each. I also found it strange that when I went to the menu to look for some drivers to load, I still saw both my hard drives available. Even stranger was the fact that their letter designations were reversed, and the IDE was the C: drive while the SATA was the D: drive. Hmmmm…
As I suspected, somehow the BIOS options had changed themselves to try and boot the IDE drive first. I had seen a few things online about Vista doing odd things with the boot order, but after I set the BIOS options to boot the SATA hard drive first I had no problems rebooting. I wonder if this is from the recent pushing of Vista SP1, since I know SP1 changed some of my other computer settings, but it seems odd that the OS can alter your BIOS like that. I ran CHKDSK last night on the SATA, and it fixed some orphaned files, so hopefully my Seagate drive is OK (considering it is only about a year old).
