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So yesterday I spent more than half the day trying to get that screwed up harddrive to boot up again, but couldn’t. Even BartPE refused to boot up if that screwed-up drive was connected. So then I used BartPE to back up my data drive, installed Vista on this data drive, then backed up the data of the screwed-up harddrive. These all went well…

So to get the harddrive back to working order, I should just need to install an OS on it, and use the partition utilities provided by the OS. So I installed Vista back on it again. The installation went well, but then it still failed to boot up on its own. Uh-oh. Then I realized something funny. During the installation process, the partition utility showed one extra partition that’s 0MB, but I couldn’t get rid of it. Maybe the MBR is messed up so badly that Vista can’t fix it nor format it. OK, let’s try Western Digital’s own utility.

Ran all diagnostic tests of WD’s own diagnostic utility, and all results came up clean. No errors found whatsoever. Argh. Then ran WD’s own tool disk. No errors found again, BUT, it refuses to partition and format the harddrive. Finally I did a low-level format to the first and last sectors of the drive, then ran the partition utility again. All seems to be OK now…

After all this mess, I still have not given up on getting a dual boot setup. As I’m typing up this blog entry, I’m installing XP on the second partition first, and then I’ll install Vista on the first. Fingers crossed…