A Battle of Wills

I had a little scuffle with a computer over the weekend. In the end I won the war. Here is what I sent to the people I did it for (I erased names because I don't like leaving stuff like that on the internet):

I have just succeeded in bringing to life the VISION machine. It has taken me forever to get here. I’ve used all my potions and I’m out of magic and had to venture to places unheard of. In the end I’m pretty sure I gained a level (if not two) and this thing is running in RAID1 without any further issues that I can see.

I shall tell the tale here and I’ll try to make it entertaining so it is worth the read.

Friday:

First in order to get data off the IDE drive I commandeered [Someone]’s SATA to USB device which I found out is very touchy. So I have cables running here there and everywhere. I go to boot from the USB drive to clone the bloody thing and lo and behold it won’t recognize the USB drive. I poke about in BIOS and find a setting for USB Boot and it is enabled. Well what a liar that turned out to be. I talked to [Someone] because once upon a time he had created a no USB disc for [Someone] (Which unfortunately had recently just gone missing, I’m assuming someone needed it worse than he did). [Someone] let me know the ISO was on the USB stick. Great. Now who has a blank disc? I sift through [Someone]’s cube a bit, then [Someone]’s, and finally get a brilliant idea that [Someone] might have one. I finally located a CD-RW (Thanks [Someone]) and get the thing burned. [Someone] had some blank DVD’s but of course this computer only has a CD drive. So I slam the disc into the tray and get it to boot to the disk. The disk boots and it looks different from the USB but it is manageable. I open up Ghost and there are two 40GB drives and no 250GB drive that is plugged in. So I fiddle with the stupid cables and bit and close and reopen ghost (repeat 4-5 times). I finally get the drive recognized when I realize I don’t know which flippin’ 40 gig I’m supposed to image. So I close ghost and pop the power cable off the back of the one that I know it’s NOT. This freezes everything. I gracefully pulled the power plug and jam it back into the power supply. Once it booted back up I had what I needed and let it image overnight.

Saturday:

The disk had successfully imaged. I decided that I didn’t want to have to do that again so I pulled out my trusty cloning machine and imaged the disk again so in case I really screwed something up I’d have something to fall back on rather than dealing with all that again. So after getting a backup copy I nabbed the assigned PC from [Someone]’s desk that was going to be the mew machine. I figured I’d start it up and make sure that it would boot. It did. This would be the first and last thing that would work without a hitch. I went to login and it throws a windows activation dialogue at me. Ok I’ve done that before. No NIC drivers but I’ll just use the phone. I call the number provided and there is about 20 minutes worth of no support for XP but you can still activate it blah blah blah. It finally asks if I’m activating XP. Yes. Another 20 minute dialogue on how this is going to work and how to read a pile of numbers in. I read the numbers in and it tells me it’s not good. Fine. We (used) to have XP keys all over the place. I go looking for an old sticker and completely luck out. I finally pinched the one on [Someone]’s XP machine sitting on his desk and plunk that key in and call the number AGAIN. It finally activates and I install the drivers and make sure it’ll work. Good.

Now I figure I’ll throw in that second hard drive for the RAID and we’ll be off to the races. I create the RAID and take my backup image and reimage the now mirrored hard drives. I yank out the backup drive and reboot and because it is no longer IDE it starts having boot loops for lunch. Knowing what a fun time I’m going to have with that I prod Google to tell me what to do and I find what seems like a possible solution. First I’ll need to boot in IDE though and tweak a few things. So I throw the backup drive in and as it boots go looking for another key so I don’t have to use [Someone]’s. I found one on a machine in the server room. Thinking I’m being thrifty I grab a picture of it and go back to my desk to activate this thing again. I change the key and get it activated again. I installed the drivers and reboot. I log in and it tells me that I need to activate……again? Fine. I click yes and it says windows is already activated. I click ok and it says I need to activate……You see the pattern developing here? I reimaged in case something just didn’t work correctly after a driver install. I call to activate again….this time I got a picture of the numbers given to me to activate so I could save myself hours of time from being on the phone and getting a lecture on windows XP every time. After activating multiple times with no change I again prod Google for an answer. I spend 5 HOURS trying everything I see on Google. The closest I got was pulling WPA.DBL off an XP disk and overwriting the one there. It finally let me get to the telephone activation point but didn’t ever generate an installation ID. In the meantime I’ve tried something and broken windows and reimaged at least 10+ times (registry edits, strange commands, file tweaks you name it). I asked [Someone] about it but he was just as perplexed as I was. It’s safe to say I was out of time and patience and I went home pretty bent out of shape that the stupid activation wizard was turning out to be my biggest foe. I’m sure there are ways to crack the stupid thing and run free from there but I didn’t want to risk becoming illegal or anything so I just fumed the rest of the night.

Sunday:

This morning I’d decided to again try the key from [Someone]’s machine just by some off chance that the key would make any difference. I of course have a different installation ID so I get to call in again. *sigh* I immediately get a picture once I get the magic numbers just in case I get to slam my head on the desk doing it all over again today. I activate and reboot and praise Micro friggin’ Soft it didn’t bug me at all again about activation. So I run through and install drivers and before I start breaking things again trying to get RAID working I imaged the backup to the RAID array and then went back to IDE to play with settings again. The initial idea I tried was for Windows 7 only…..go figure. So I went through about another 5 sites before I found something that look fairly doable. To try and shorten this a bit here is the magic I performed:

http://bonapartepanjaitan.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-to-change-from-ide-to-ahciraid-mode.html

I then switched to RAID and just booted the one drive and it worked to my amazement. I quickly logged in looked around and installed the Intel RAID drivers and such and then imaged to the RAID array. I yanked the single drive and booted with all my fingers crossed, arms, toes, eyes, and anything else I could think of to cross and watched as it booted. I go to log in and that blankety blank activation screen is back. Fine. I tried activate online first and never could contact a server. I’m assuming they’ve taken those down. So I went for the phone option again (of course getting a picture when I was done). It activated and after a reboot had stayed that way. I am now going to celebrate my triumph with lunch. I have defeated a mighty Wizard of activation that I do not wish to deal with ever again….or maybe I just went around it… but still I feel pretty dang good about myself considering I don’t have to feel like I spun my wheels for two days for nothing. I considered blowing the dust out but figured it was too great a risk and might allow the magic to escape so I now bestow my trophy on [Someone]’s desk.

I then stuck a sticky note on the computer and wrote "Here lies 16 hours of frustration, fatigue, and the biggest PITA I've EVER ventured to conquer." Crap like that I'd just reinstall windows any ol' day of the week and call it a day and save myself the trouble, but they didn't have the software to reinstall on this thing and it being special required....nay demanded blood, sweat, and tears. It does feel really good when you solve something that has felt impossible though. It's even better that it's over and done with.