Things aren’t quite as bad as I thought last night. I have, for instance, got Agent working, by the simple brute force expedient of running it in Win XP compatibility mode. Sometimes the old ways are the best – literally, in this case.
However, I also ran off a list of all the installed software under the Vista regime. This is going to take weeks to get everything back up and running. Having made myself despondent I thought a bit of hardware hacking might help. It’s always therapeutic to pull the insides out of a PC and put them back together again – as long as it works afterwards.
Needless to say, in this case it didn’t. I’d found an extra SATA power adaptor and data cable, so went for the three drive setup. This involved moving the current system drive to another SATA port – when the right-angle cable necessary to fit under the extended graphics card broke, leaving part embedded in the motherboard connector. One fine pair of pliers later, the offending plastic was removed, and I was able to get all three SATA connections up and running.
Reboot – and only two drives showing. The original data drive was AWOL: this was not what I expected, since it was the one cable I hadn’t touched, so it’s back inside the case again and check all the connections. Turns out that the power lead to the drive had become adrift, so everything gets hammered back in as usual (which is possibly why the SATA connector above broke in the first place…), switch things back on and hey presto, three drives.
Next question – which Samsung is the data drive and which is the old system drive in the BIOS? Trial and error (emphasis on the latter) eventually got the drives in the right order, and I now have a Windows 7 workstation which boots up, complete with operational software. Well, some of it’s operational, which is where we started.
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