I bought new hard drives, and installed Windows XP again. Ugh. They make it hard! I spent hours playing with nLite, trying to “slipstream” the right drivers for my mirrored disks (i.e. add the necessary files to the Windows CD and burn a new copy). Created two nice coasters. Well, they were fully functional Windows XP CDs, and they actually have my serial number embedded in them, which is not ideal I suppose, but most disappointingly they don’t have the drivers I needed.

Eventually, it worked. Getting the rest of my system set up now.

Some software makes it easy!

Firefox, Thunderbird & MozBackup: I backed up the profiles off my old Windows installation, onto disk. Restored them with MozBackup into the new installation of Windows. Wow, it’s like I never left the old installation! Everything’s still there, even my browsing history, bookmarks and search engines! <3

SuperCopier: Oh my, I love this. When mass-copying my old home directory off the old Windows disk, there would be some files that refused to be copied. “Normal” Windows Explorer copying would cut out, and I’d have to locate the irritating file, and manually copy all the files around it. Not now! SuperCopier to the rescue! It’s robust in the face of errors. Skip that dodgy file, get the rest of the job done thanks. It just leaves me a list of files that were “errors”. Most of the time these files are inconsequential and I would have deleted them later anyway! <3

That’s my love-list for now. MozBackup even backed up my password for this blog!

No mashed potatoes in this post.