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I’ve never insisted that I was particularly bright. Which is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that, up until this week, I had no serious backup setup for my computers at home. What changed this week, you ask?

Computer crash.

My wife’s achy old Dell B130 would only boot to the Blue Screen of Sadness, so I got it into diagnostic mode and did some tests; the hard drive failed like a fat kid in gym. It did at least START to load Windows before it would roll over and point its feet in the air, so there must be SOMETHING remaining on the drive. I deduced that with a little genius, I could get it back to life.

This did at least give me an opportunity to do a little shopping on Amazon. I ordered a new 80GB drive for HW’s laptop, thereby doubling her original capacity. Since I’m a moron and had never bothered to do proper backups, I also ordered a 1TB, that’s 1000GB, USB drive to start doing so. I also picked up a $15 laptop drive enclosure, so that I could put Sarah’s old drive in, and then plug in via USB to my Mac. If I could get the old drive to spin up, hopefully I’d be able to recover some data.

What I didn’t have, and couldn’t easily get, was any kind of “reinstall” CD. If the laptop had come with one, we couldn’t find it. There was a sticker on the bottom of the case with a product ID number for Windows XP Home, so I bugged my dad to lend me his Windows XP Home CD, and went to town. Inserting the new 80GB hard drive was a breeze; switch around a few screws and a protective plate from the old drive to the new, and plug that puppy in. Mounted the Windows CD, formatted the hard drive, and XP Home was on its way. It prompted for the product ID number from the sticker on the bottom of the lappy, and I typed it in.

“The CD Key which you entered is invalid.”

Huh? Maybe I mistyped it. It was annoying flipping the laptop over to get 5 digits of the code, and then flipping it back to type them in, so I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the code down, then typed it in again.

“The CD Key which you entered is invalid.”

What the heuristic hell? I checked the key I’d written down against the sticker once more; it was accurate. What I had was a Windows XP Home License that didn’t work with the Windows XP Home CD I had. Good job, Microsoft; no wonder you’re laying off thousands. (In a related story, my Mac is awesome.) I later deduced that the code I had was valid if I could have found the original Dell installation CD, but since I don’t have one, I was SOL.

I did a little poking around warez sites to try and get a code, but none worked. Finally, through A Source, I was able to get a functioning code. It might not be ENTIRELY legal, but I reasoned that the laptop has a license for Windows XP Home, I’m trying to install Windows XP Home, it’s not my fault that Dell didn’t give me a CD to match the license key I had.

Finally got it installed and booted, only to discover that the CD came with only the barest drivers, none of which worked with the network cards in the lappy. So I had to waste a CD-R on the drivers I downloaded from Dell, but oh well. These are the prices we pay. (Along with, of course, the $200 for the various components I had to buy.)

Once that was done, I turned my attention to the old hard drive, which I screwed into the little enclosure I’d bought and connected to my Mac. It immediately recognized the drive, spun it up, and displayed all Sarah’s folders. Good times! I’ll just drag and drop. It copied around 6GB of data, and then EPIC FAIL!

Whatever was wrong with the drive (corruption, bad sectors, etc.) was preventing me from copying the entire thing. I decided I’d start with just getting the My Documents directories, so I dragged and dropped those: EPIC YAY!!!111!one

Final result: $200 spent, laptop disk capacity doubled, and 1TB backup drive purchased, which also gives me the ability to back up my entire gaming/recording desktop in the basement and rebuild it from scratch without all the spyware and viruses one gets from developing a truly mammoth collection of pornography illegal music jpegs of puppies.