In a seemingly never-ending series of computer mishaps, I had a hard drive go bad this weekend. I bought some new ones and a new controller card because it seems to be working well enough to get at least some of the old data off. As part of that new controller card, I have to load a driver during Windows (XP Pro) installation, which is fine. I had to do that for the old one, too. But this time, at some point during the installation process before it gets to asking for the driver floppy, it starts spinning the floppy drive constantly so that when I get to trying to insert the driver floppy, it doesn't see it. It's like I've got the floppy drive cable installed backwards, but I don't. Anyway, if I skip past that step, it stops spinning the drive. It's like it's explicity trying to keep me from installing that driver. And I just did this a month ago without problem. The only thing that's changed is that I've added those two new drives and the controller card. I've not yet tried just moving the controller card, as I can't see why that would be the problem, but I guess I'll try in a little while. Anyone have any other great ideas?

You could use XPCreate to make a new XP CD to install off of, with the drivers integrated. Their instructions are short, more detailed ones can be found out there if needed.

Jeez. What's going on with HDs? You're like the 4th person including me to have a HD die in the last week.

Is the old controller card still in there?

Or nLite. It will create a slipstreamed XP SP2 disc, and you can add drivers, programs and strip out any of the standard Windows crap you don't want. I've never used XPCreate, but I've found nLite to be very helpful.

Yeah, but stupid me decided it'd be a good idea to RAID0 the two drives on the motherboard, and if I'm to have any hope of getting that data back, I'm going to have to leave them as-is for the time being.

As it turns out, the floppy drive only screws up when I set one of the new hard drives as the master drive to boot from. This makes no sense at all. And I don't want it even thinking about touching the RAID0 set that's in there, so I didn't want that to be set as the primary boot drive. Fortunately, I've got an old SCSI card in the machine that I use for basically nothing (I really should just remove it) that I can set as the primary boot drive at least long enough to get Windows installed.