I think I mentioned last week that the hard drive started to fail on my primary desktop at home. I bought a new drive from my favorite online vendor and spent the weekend getting everything up and running again. Things went fairly smoothly with a few exceptions:

• I discovered that my machine cannot boot to its DVD drive. This took hours to figure out, the machine was failing to boot to the windows xp install cd. Ultimately I pulled the cd rom from my linux box and got it booting that way.
• I cannot seem to get Firewire working reliably. The DVD burner constantly disconnects from the machine, seemingly at random, which among other things causes burning of DVDs to fail. I’m still digging into this one. So far I know it is a known issue pre-service pak 1, but I already have that installed so thats not it.

Other than that, and the fact that I basically have no software installed yet, (oh, and the fact that it took pretty much all weekend) things went ok.

Have I mentioned how much I dislike Windows? Would that there was something better.