I've been hearing good things about SSDs for a while now. Now I've run out of space on the XP machine (a Thinkpad R60e) that I use for music and photos it seemed like a good time to go through the pain of an upgrade. I picked up a couple of 128Gig drives (CT128M225) from Crucial[1], one for the crammed XP box and another for the Linux box (a Thinkpad X40) Oops. Wrong dimensions and connector for the X40 - an alternative is on order.
I also picked up a terrabyte external disk pack to back everything up to. I learn - slowly, but I do. There's nothing quite like the buzzing cold feeling of formatting the sole disk containing the last month's work to give you that zealous enthusiasm for data recovery. Backup done, off we go with the install. Not quite as simple as I hoped, but I got there:
- Remove old disk, insert new disk. Boot. BIOS recognises it. Hussah!
- Insert XP installer CD. Reboot.
- No dice; XP doesn't admit the existence of any such disk drive. Why do we still have BIOSes? Someone remind me. On second thoughts don't.
After a bit of asking around, Googling, and so forth, it emerges that XP doesn't support SATA drives without external drivers. They have to be installed from a floppy disk. I don't have a floppy disk drive. Which is a bit strange because I know I installed it originally and I don't remember using a floppy disk at any stage in the process[2].
Worried that I have a duff disk I decide to install Ubuntu (9.04) on it. Goes on like a charm in about 40 minutes, most of which I spend eating toast. Installers that ask all the questions up front make life so much easier. I start to see a possible glimmer.
I install VirtualBox. Well, "install" makes it sound more intrepid than it warrants:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox
God I love aptitude. Anyway, that sorted out I install XP within VirtualBox. That boots and runs rather nicely. Interesting experiment - it looks to me like running Ubuntu as the "real" OS with VirtualBox is a real option if you only need a handful of Windows apps. Anyway, moving on:
Using nLite within the virtual Windows session I built a SlipStream ISO from my WinXP SP2 disk that includes the SATA drivers I need[3] for my chipset.
Drag the ISO out into the host Ubuntu OS and burn it to a CD. Reboot...
Setup cannot find the End-User License Agreement (EULA)
WTF? Did I accidentally overwrite it or something? After a bit of Googling again, however, it turns out that this is possibly one of the least helpful error messages I've ever seen. That's actually quite a high bar[4]. Still, I suppose Microsoft can't be held entirely culpable for errors caused when a third party is cobbling a disk together like this. Anyway, the real problem seems to be related to this ticket: 326673 Error Message: Setup Cannot Find the End-User License Agreement
Despite the details described there that seems to also apply if you have a partition type that XP can't interpret. Ho hum. I could zap Ubuntu and have another go at booting, but if that doesn't work I'm going to want to boot something and installing again seems a bit of a waste of time. Hmm, let's try it with SP3 as well:
- Reboot Ubuntu.
- Boot into VirtualBox.
- Download SP3 and rebuild the slipstream disk with that added.
- Drag ISO out into Ubuntu.
- Burn ISO.
- Reboot.
- Hallelujah.
After the usual multi-hour install process[5] (well, XP is old, it's supposed to be better in Windows 7, we'll forgive it) and jiggling config to get XP to NEVER give me another popup nag message EVER under ANY circumstances OR ELSE, I'm up and running.
The verdict: damn, SSDs are nice. Ubuntu booted from cold in about 12 seconds. XP in about 20. That's to useful work mode. Application loads are distinctly snappy. We'll see how the currently clean install handles when it's had a bit of time to accumulate cruft (I'll update as and when). Running the laptop without any disk noise is just slightly creepy. But aside from that it's well worth the effort.[6]
I do like the way that this article has absolutely no topicality. Both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 came out a few weeks back and here I am installing an ancient copy of Windows and a mildly venerable version of Linux. But what the heck, I had to go through the pain so you can read it or shove off.Footnotes
1. I tried Dabs, but they played the in-stock-until-you-actually-order-it game again. I don't think I'll bother buying from Dabs in future.
2. After a while I decided I must have used a Thinkpad floppy disk drive that I used to have kicking around to install XP. Then after a bit more thought I realised that that drive required the ultrabay and the cheapo R60e (yes, the 'e' stands for "economy") I have now didn't have an ultrabay slot.
3. Downloaded from the IBM website - one of the nice things about Thinkpads is that there is or was great product support in the way of driver and reference manual downloads.
4. My personal favourite is the eminently passive "There has been an error", but at least it doesn't mislead you.
5. In the neolithic era when I did tech support for the dear departed ICL we used to tell people to reinstall Windows for Workgroups 3.11 if we couldn't figure out what the problem was. It didn't help, but generally they got so disheartened at the prospect that they gave up on whatever bit of flakey software we'd foisted upon them and never reappeared on our ticket queue. This is what happens when you use the wrong metrics to measure "quality".
6. I'm still perplexed about how I previously installed XP on the machine; there's no way I could have forgotten building a slipstream disk and I know I didn't use a dodgy 'warez' version.