After all that, the DVD drive is...

Technology Mar 18, 2005

Oh dear. Looks like the DVD on DDS drive is faulty. Updated the firmware, it was like 3 levels behind. But still not working properly. Come to think of it, that rings a bell. Yep, my old faithful Book Of Wisdom (my log book where I scrawl such things) reports it was playing up – including disabling the whole IDE channel, causing a hard crash of Windows. So it had been unplugged some time ago. Should have remembered that! Kick self. Move on.
So I swapped over the DVD for a CD drive. That’s right. I did it myself and it booted first time. XP-CD recovery console loaded…and again failed with same “C: drive not there” error. Rebooted and tried an install per se to see if it would ‘recover’ ; which I’ve seen it do before. Not this time. Found the C: drive (partition), but said it was faulty. Kick PC. Move on.