The disks arrived yesterday from Dell. That was quite quick. I was pleased (undeservedly so) and got right to work on the project. I first booted from the recovery disk. And tried a repair. Reboot and that left the stuck mcafee entry in the registry. Remember my problem is that the privacy software was blocking the wireless tcpip and I couldn’t get it to uninstall or install. So that problem remained. I tried a few other things. Visualize a dying fish on the end of line flopping about struggling to get loose. You, that was me. So I more ahear to a reinstall. An HOUR LATER, arch, the new disks trow up all sorts of missing file errors and hangs. Argh! So I dig out an old xp pro sp1 install disk and copy it to the hard drive. And retry. Luckily I was smart enough not to reformat the ntfs partition else it would have been really bricked. So when going through the pig again, I was able to find the missing files on the “old” installation disk. Install completes and it is ugly. No drivers are loaded and I have forgotten how to be administrator. Argh. Argh. So I start pouring in the disks they sent me. I was under the illusion that the “recovery disks” would magically transport me back to the way it was when it arrived. Hah! Another two HOURS of fruitless playing with the stuff gets me to a working system with zero connectivity to my home net. So I start zeroing in on drivers. Mind you now, I have nothing workign in the way of a browser or any other tools. just my wits. So I go back to the driver disk. I had thought that it would intall the necessary drivers that it knew I needed. Nope, gotta go in and do them one by one. Argh! Argh! I got that working and could connect to the world. Yeah. Still have to reinstall Office Xp but tomorrow night.
One nagging problem is that it didn’t pick up me “reinkefj” from the prior install. My files and stuff are all there. It is just that it’s not seeing it as a user. Argh! So, last thing before I went to bed was to kick off a massive copy from the old “reinkefj” to the new “reinkefj dot machinename”. I have no idea how that went since I got up late. Argh!
Whatta mess. Thanks mcafee!
Posted by reinkefj 
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