[SPOILER: Nope. Not the way to do it. Except for the sentence in green.]

My Windows PC has died rather dead. It does not recognize my boot drive, nor does it boot from my two back-up external drives or from the boot USB I prepared a year ago. Thus continues my 30 year streak of never having made a Windows backup — on any at least four different types of media –that I could successfully back up from.

I thus have to make a new USB boot drive but from my Mac because it turns out that I don’t know anyone within driving distance who uses a PC. And, in truth, I only use mine for games.

There are bunches of pages that tell you the Mac terminal commands that should teach you how to load the Windows installer from Windows , but one of the best I found is by Quincy Larson at FreecodeCamp. Be warned: the process is sloooowwww.

My PC booted from the USB stick, after telling the PC, via the BIOS, that that’s the drive to boot from.

The next step is two spend 2.5 days repeatedly trying to get Windows to install onto a hard drive. My directions are: try everything randomly, learn how to use “diskpart” so you can use trial and error to come up with the right partition and formatting for the receiving drive, memorize by heart and then by muscle memory the keyboard shortcuts for walking through the preliminaries of the Windows installation process, convert the receiving drive from MSR to GPT and back again as often as you can all so that at last …

… you can repeatedly be told that there are no partitions on the receiving drive, and Windows has no way of creating or formatting partitions on the disk that you know that you just partitioned and formatted, even if you politely press the “Delete” button first.

Then, when you’re at you’re breaking point looking at the Windows error message that tells you to read system logs that you can’t find and wouldn’t understand if you could, go back to DISKPART, clean (erase) your disk once more, and either create a partition but do not format it, or don’t even create a partition. At this point I honestly can’t remember. Install Windows onto that disk and you’re good to go…

…where “good to go” means to start reinstalling every bloody program because Windows’ Registry is a jealous god.

Thus does Windows continue it’s long of tradition of being great so long as everything goes well, and being a freaking nightmare when anything goes wrong.

Just ask Clippy.

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Last week I paid a visit to my old PC store, ICG Computers, in Brookline. I hadn’t been there in maybe 5 years because I switched to Macs and thus spend time at the Computer Loft in Brighton. Also, when I was a PC, I was building my own computers out of components, so lots more went wrong (= I did lots more wrong). And, yes, I wish I could compile my own hardware and install the Mac OS on it. (Hackintosh scares me. Someday.) But, my remaining Windows machine crapped out last week, so I carried it to ICG’s small storefront.

Ray greeted me by name. Because no one else was there, we took the opportunity to catch up.

Ray comes from China and runs a quintessential American small business. He’s honest as the day is long, and could teach any bigger company about customer service. But it’s been a lean few years for ICG. Ray says that the recession hurt his primary customer base, small businesses. There haven’t been a lot of new businesses formed, so they’re not coming in to equip their offices. And, of course, the PC business has gotten commoditized. So, ICG relies on repairs and aggressively trying to beat the Internet on prices.

The walls of the store are lined with components. Then there are a few tables of new and used machines. He prices his used machines against eBay, and his new machines against Net low-ballers. As a result, you can get a power-packed laptop for $250 or $300. And you can do so knowing that Ray knows the tech and stands behind what he sells.

ICG is a great place to buy a computer. It’s also a great place to hang out and talk about tech. Ray knows my own level of expertise and talks at that level. No condescension, no salesmanship, no BS. I always learn something talking with Ray. In this case it turns out that my PC needed a new power supply, and the one I’d put in was under-powered. So, yeah, Ray upsold me, but I have complete confidence that he also right-sold me, so to speak.

Bunches of small, locally-owned computer stores have gone out of business here over the past few years. So have most of the larger stores. Remember EggHead? CompUSA? Me neither. And much as I love the Internet, I hate what it’s doing to the Rays of our town, who epitomize the best of small business. ICG is surviving and will continue to serve our community. But I want Ray’s business to do more than that. It seems unfair that honesty, expertise, friendliness, and low, fair prices aren’t enough for a business to go gangbusters.

Am I plugging ICG? Damn straight.

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Yesterday Disk Utility told me to restart my Mac from a boot disk and run the disk repair function (= Disk Utility). Fine. Except I was unable to boot from any of my three Mac boot disks (including the original) whether they were in my laptop’s SuperDrive (= Apple’s plain old DVD drive) or in a USB-connected DVD drive. The system would notice the DVD when asked to look for boot devices (= hold down the Option key when starting up), but froze after I clicked on the DVD (= no change in the screen after 30 mins).

So, what the hell, I installed Lion, which I had been hoping to avoid (= my pathetic resistance to Apple’s creeping Big Brotherism). Thanks to the generosity of Guillaume Gète, I downloaded Lion DiskMaker, followed the simple instructions (= re-downloaded Lion, all part of Apple’s makings things hard by making them easy program), and now have a Lion boot disk. I was able to boot from it and fix my hard drive.

The whole episode was so reminiscent of why I left Windows (= Windows 7 looks pretty good these days).

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Because one of our children needs a new computer, I’ve ordered a brand new 15″ MacBook Pro … for myself. Our child will get my current MacBook 13″. Don’t look at me like that! I’m more of a power user than our child is. And I’m older. Also, I’m paying for it. But mainly it’s a totally rational decision that happens to work out in my favor.

I know that setting up the new Mac will be simple. I’ll plug my old one into the new one (I’m getting a firewire cable that’s 400 on one and 800 on the other, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll connect through the ethernet ports) and the new Mac will suck the life force (= my user directories ‘n’ stuff) out of the old one.

What will really take some time is rebuilding my Bootcamp Windows XP partition: Reinstall XP, and reinstall the few apps I use. (I am still using Microsoft Money, waiting for the new version of Quicken for the Mac, which keeps getting postponed.) I’d much rather clone the old Bootcamp partition onto the new machine. So, I looked around and found Bart PE and YouTube instructions for burning a Bart PE boot disk. I believe I now have to make a disk image of my current Windows partition, save it onto a USB hard drive, and then, well, I don’t exactly know, but I’ll figure it out. Maybe.

[Tags: macbook mac windows os_x clone bootcamp ]

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