So after spending about 3 weeks futzing around with Solid State Drives, Vista and Windows 7, I think I have come to a set of truths that I have learned.

First, upgrading your operating system is a mistake, you should always install a new clean version of your operating system no matter what. You can find all the install codes you need for your software and you can figure out how to back up your data, and a clean install just fixes a myriad of problems and sins that have built up over the life of your previous operating system lifetime.

I managed to get a good size solid state drive, and I have learned that if you install your operating system correctly on the device, your system will run much better (if you are running Windows 7). I think putting an SSD on a Vista or XP system is just not worth doing (Windows 7 seems to understand the devices and optimizes to use it). You should run Windows 7 to use an SSD.

Attempting to Clone your disk to the SSD while it sounds like an interesting concept, is a bloody waste of your time. I ended up with a somewhat faster system, but, not as fast as when I simply reloaded the OS from scratch and loaded it onto a formatted SSD.

I am not sure what the lifetime of an SSD is, so you should have a reliable back up system for your important data (or better still have all your important data on a NAS or server elsewhere). This makes the system you are running on almost “disposable”, but it is much faster for now, and that is what you are looking for.

The system I upgraded was a POS HP Laptop, which was having no end of issues with Blue Screens of Death and overheating issues that seem to have subsided for now. As I have ranted previously HP laptops are not worth buying, and not worth buying at any price (I have had to replace 2 of them for my daughters), but if you stick an SSD in one, it might make it a bit more reliable (I we shall see).

All in all an interesting experiment, but if I had simply started from scratch as I was told to do by folks in the know, I wouldn’t have wasted 3 weeks the way I did.

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Dell Vostro and the Corrupt Vista BCD

This post is mostly a note page for me on how I fixed my wife’s DELL Vostro  1400.

This morning I woke up and tried to boot my wife’s Vostro and got a “Screen of Death” of sorts.

File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc0000034
Info: The Windows Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information

In hindsight I suspect that Norton Anti-virus did something to the system, because the previous night Norton Anti-virus put up a note saying, “Doing stuff in the background”, and this morning the system was dead? Interesting coincidence at least.

Naturally I go to google and type in “Vista BCD Boot Fail” and found the following link:

Corrupt \Boot\BCD in Windows Vista

Which made me feel better, because at least someone was posting something about this issue. First thing it said I needed was a Vista Boot DVD, luckily I had my upgrade DVD (to Home Premium) so I was able to boot from it (after hitting F12 and choosing the DVD as the boot media).

The post above talked about recovering the boot track using a backup utility which I didn’t have, however it pointed to:

This useful Microsoft help page

Which outlined three fix procedures, all 3 of which failed miserably for me, but taught me a lot about how to debug windows, boot areas.

Frustrated I went back to Google and typed in: “Dell Vostro BCD Boot Fail” and found this:

The Real Answer from Microsoft Help

Which in fact outlines how to use bootrec, which fixes the boot record for the Windows Vista operating system.

The following steps are what I did exactly, after booting from the Vista boot DVD and choosing the command prompt:

Note If rebuilding the BCD does not resolve the startup issue, you can export and delete the BCD, and then run this option again. By doing this, you make sure that the BCD is completely rebuilt. To do this, type the following commands at the Windows RE command prompt:

• bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
• c:
• cd boot
• attrib bcd -s -h -r
• ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
• bootrec /RebuildBcd

I rebooted after each command returned correctly and voila the system was back up.

Epilogue

Given I did a bunch of crap, including trying old restore points, I assume I have buggered up the system in some fashion or another, but we shall see there.

Norton came up and complained about being corrupted so I have reloaded it as well, and hopefully it will not do whatever it did last night to corrupt the BCD? Or whatever..

Sorry folks, needed to write this down, a little off topic, but useful to me.

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