On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 20:12:57 -0800, "Jim"
XP is as weak as a butterfly in a sandstorm when it comes to surviving
a transfer between one HD and another, So make sure you get a biiiig
HD, because it may be for the life of that installation!
File-level copies fail, even if you copy absolutely everything and
don't get LFN/8.3 names in a twist (all those MICROS~? dirs in
"Program Files" get arbitrary 8.3 names based on the order they are
copied, breaking registry references to these, etc.).
So you are forced to do a partition image copy, for which no tools are
provided by the OS. Even then, as you find, XP will fall on its butt,
more often than not.
Changing the HD can also lose 3 WPA lives:
- the HD itself, which is to be expected
- loss of optical drive, if you'd plugged in new HD instead
- change in volume serial number, if formatted of converted C:
That's one life short of breaking the bank. If you'd added RAM, or
changed SVGA, etc. in the last 3 months, you will get DoS'd by WPA if
4 lives gone. If you "strobe" a setting so that never a three-month
period goes by without a "change" (e.g. if you toggle processor serial
number visibility via CMOS) then that may be enough.
However, I've seen the mess you describe, and it's not a natural case
of "too many changes" setting WPA on your case. It's something
deeper, and I suspect WPA just happens to be the first code to notice
that things just aren't as they should be. The pattern:
1) XP boots to blue logon screen
2) But never gets as far as showing accounts to choose
3) Dialog comes up "unable to verify.." as you describe
4) Whatever action you take, system dawdles with no HD action...
5) ...and then loops back to (3) all over again
6) There's no clean way out; you are forced to bad-exit
I've posted this before, and have never had any technical details
offered as to why this is, and what the mechanisms are. Just...
boot from your CD and do a repair and then you should be
able to activate after the repair
....which is unacceptably messy, IMO.
all files should be intact after the repair.
Rubbish; you will lose all your subsystem updates and bugfixes, and
when you go online to download these all over again, Lovesan etc. will
shoot you to pieces through the "fit to ship" defective RPC code.
Compared to the norms set by MSDOS, Win3.yuk and Win9x, this is one
area where XP drools and blows chunks out both ends.
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Dreams are stack dumps of the soul
