Sometimes you just have to laugh...
Yet another tale of trouble with my Windows PC.
I have two hard drives in my PC. One with Windows XP and the other with Windows Vista (now Windows 7 beta).
These two drives co-exist peacefully without any knowledge of each other. I use BIOS to determine which drive (and OS) loads first and life has been good. When I have problems with one OS, I use the other.
Since I finally fixed the power supply issue, I have tried gaming with Windows 7 and DX10. I installed steam and then Bioshock and Company of Heroes.
Since I had been playing these games on Windows XP, I needed to copy the save games from one drive to another. No problem, right? Both drives are NTFS and in the same PC.
From Win7, I click on the 2nd drive to load the save games from the XP drive. Fail...
Win7 complains that I dont have permissions to see this drive. What?? Never seen that before. But not to worry, it asks me if I want to continue and fix the permissions. Why not. I say YES and wait a long time while that happens.
I get access to the files, copy them over, continue gaming with Win7. Yay.
Until last night when I bought Dawn of War 2, again on steam. The game downloads without problem but when I try to run it, i get problems.
The first run experience fails. First it tries to install Direct X, I get a window that pops up too fast for me to read and then nothing. The install has failed. So I try to run the game again.
This time it tries to install Games For Windows Live. This fails too.
After a while mucking with this and looking for help on the Internets, I give up. It wont start.
No problem, I think. I will just go back to Windows XP and install it there. I think you can see where this is going.
I switch the drives in BIOS, boot up Windows XP, and once I enter my login name and password, it sort of sits there. Eternal bootup is the first sign of disaster.
Eventually I get to the desktop but its still really slow. More importantly Steam never starts. I try to start it myself, it shows in the process list, but it never finishes starting. Now I have that sinking feeling.
I reboot and this time it comes up with a desktop and no command bar at all. Not good. I run the XP disk checker - no errors found... Now what?
With the two drive setup, nothing I did in win7 should have affected XP. The only thing I can think of is that weird permission thing. *sigh*
Now my fallback has fallen. I am not playing my new game and I am probably going to be re-installing Windows XP and all my games all over again. The joys of Windows-Quest never end.
