A few hours ago I said I was going to try installing XP to an external USB drive, in hope that it will work and I can then backup my files. It worked, on my laptop, but not my screwed-up main system. Maybe the motherboard is too old for this kind of USB booting. Enter BartPE again…
The problem I had with BartPE was that it can’t display the unicode filenames properly, so I thought the file transfer may destroy the filenames and leave me with thousands of files with meaningless filenames. Doesn’t look like I have a choice though (as I still do not want to open up the computer tower to install another harddrive).
Fired up BartPE again, and transferred a few test files, fully expecting that the filenames will become a bunch of “??” as displayed. Brought that usb key to my laptop, and it turns out that the filenames are good! Happily surprised.
So BartPE booted together with my data harddrive, but still doesn’t want to boot with a badly-screwed-up Vista-and-half-XP system drive, not even with the harddrive set as slave on the second IDE channel. Argh. OK, at least with the help of BartPE I can free up my data drive so that I can install a Microsoft OS on it, and then we’ll see….
As I’m going through all these troubles, I’m fully aware that if I want to backup my data quickly, I could have just taken out the harddrive and put it in an USB enclosure. This would guarantee that it won’t influence the bootup process (which is why even bootable CDs can’t boot up the computer). But I don’t feel like touching a screwdriver today (the reason deserves another blog post, which I’ll do later after my main computer is working well again), and I have a long weekend to complete this challenge, so we’ll see…
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