Gears of War landed on my desk yesterday. I picked up Call of Duty 3 tonight. I’ve still Need For Speed: Carbon sitting on my coffee table. And here it is, nearly 1:31 in the morning – the obvious question is what did I play all night?

Ghost Recovery Disc Version 10.0

Vista RTM’d today yesterday – Wednesday. Office RTM’d earlier in the week. Massive bits are going to hit all of my systems in one massive pass in the near future. Hell, I’m even considering my first hardware in years.

Given that notebook upgrades are the most perilous of all upgrades – in most cases you have to go to the manufacturer for drivers and if they don’t have one, yer screwed – I had the bright idea of swapping my hard drives one last time. I’ve been running betas and RCs of Vista for a long while and since I hate dual boot systems I decided simply swap out hard drives, when I switched OS’s – I don’t switch them often and the ThinkPad design lends itself to this type of thing. Right now I have a 100GB drive that came with the T60p and I have a 60GB drive; the former has XP SP2 and the latter has Vista RC1.

Well. Had.

I’ve been using Ghost for a long, long while to back up drives and move images; even between drives when I had to. It’s always worked well in the past. And since Vista is an unknown to Ghost, I figured it would be best to move the XP image around rather than attempting to move Vista – I wanted to install a pristine copy of Vista on the 100GB drive.

I had that thought at 8pm tonight.

Ghost acted like a surly colicky child all freakin’ night. Slow to boot off the recovery CD. Random hanging. Randomly missing or even misplacing drives. Because the drives on the T60p are SATA, that caused an ugly driver problem – I finally gave up fighting with it – and a floppy drive – and switched to Compatibility mode in the BIOS… I figured I could turn it off again once the image was in place. Core Duo? Turned off the Duo because I had heard of issues with HT systems. Turned off SpeedStep too – anything that had potential to cause a hiccup. No help. Different drives? Nope.

It’s up and running now. The 100GB drive that will get Vista sometime soon – I really want to hold off until I get an enclosure for the XP drive so I can move files around without a network – is sitting in a box, next to a stack of 360 games. The 60GB drive is spinning happily in my notebook. The external storage HDD is panting from use, but doing well otherwise. Ghost – once it got going – did the job in under 40 minutes. All of that begs the question: what was the problem for 5.5 hours?

The fucking USB cable was faulty – good enough to let the drive show in XP but it would fade in and out in WinPE.

*sigh*