My oldest laptop is an IBM T20 - anemic by modern standards but I keep it running (XP Pro) and up-to-date. Why? Well, it's handy when enjoying a long soak in the tub, and if I were to get it drenched it wouldn't be a great financial loss.
I recently found that I couldn't do Windows updates or MSE updates, tracked it down to a defective disk structure on the C: drive, and repair attempts with CHKDSK partially clobbered Windows. I decided to just do a full restore from WHS from a time
prior to the flaky behavior.
The restore reported that it couldn't find any network drivers for the Intel PRO/100 wired drivers. It could deal with the wireless card, but there doesn't seem to be any way to provide the WPA information so I think I'm limited to wired connections.
Attempts to find drivers on the web to put on a thumb drive were for naught - everything I found was in the form of an EXE file that actually installed the drivers; there was no facility to dump them to a folder.
Then I decided to read what WHS was actually telling me, and it suggested that there would be a recovery drivers folder within the Windows directory, and that this folder could be copied to the thumb drive. How reasonable and intelligent! So
I did that.
To my surprise, while the drivers do, in fact, get picked up correctly when prompting the recovery process, they don't seem to work correctly. I either blue screen quite early after recovery starts, or the recovery goes for a while, with the progress
bar maybe 20% done, and then things just hang in perpetuity. At this point, due to the partial recovery, there's no NTLDR.SYS and the machine is non-bootable. I've tried enough times to think this is not a sporadic problem.
I've got a cheap USB nic on order, and perhaps that will be the ultimate solution, but I'm curious if someone has a feel for what may have failed in what I thought would be a routine restorative process. It's no big deal to reinstall WinXP from scratch,
but I'd obviously prefer to just drop in a WHS backup image.
Art
