Regular readers will notice that computer upgrades have pretty much never worked out as planned where I'm concerned. This past weekend proved no exception. With the recent MacBook Pro Penryn upgrade, I was hankerin' for a laptop boost and even had a custom built 2.6Ghz version on order. But after further thought I decided that this latest upgrade wasn't worth the premium price and settled for a refurbed 2.4Ghz model of the previous generation for about a grand less. After selling my current model to help offset the cost, I'll have spent a comparatively minimal amount for the privilege of having a .07Ghz speed bump, maxed out 4GB of RAM (for optimal Parallels functionality) and a LED-backlit display. I can live with that.
But anyway, my plan this time was to basically swap out my existing hard drive over to the new MBP and everything would be hunky dory since there really wasn't much different between the two generations old model and the one generation old model. Unfortunately, there's enough of a difference to make Parallels blue screen. Booting directly into WinXP didn't blue screen but resulted in a non-responsive keyboard and trackpad. There's obviously some driver differences on the PC side of things. So I figured, ok, I'll just do a fresh reinstall of WinXP. Booted up with the WinXP + SP2 CD, blew away the existing WinXP partition and... couldn't recreate the partition because as far as the WinXP installer was concerned, there was already 3 partitions created (it had reassigned the C: partition to an existing 400MB partition on the drive) and it doesn't deal with more than 3 partitions. So fine, I killed the 400MB partition as well and everything proceeded seemingly normally afterwards.
That is until I tried to run Parallels again. Now it couldn't seem to find the WinXP partition to use when setting up a VM. Which I thought was weird so I opened up the Startup Disk panel in System Preferences and discovered that OS X couldn't see anything. Which was doubly weird because the machine still booted up fine and holding down the option key while booting still showed the bootable MacOS X and Windows partitions to choose between. A quick gander at my drive in Disk Utility revealed that it was now using a Master Boot Record (MBR) partition scheme rather than the MacOS X preferred GUID Partition Table (GPT). Apparently that's what happens when you play around with partitions using the WinXP installer. The only way I knew of to get it back to GPT was to repartition the entire drive with Disk Utility. *sigh*
So I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my two existing MacOS X partitions over to an external drive which took overnight since it was over 250GBs of data. Then I repartitioned the laptop drive back to how it should be, and then waited overnight again cloning everything back. So it took 2 days more than I had expected but now everything's more or less back to normal. Just have to reinstall everything back into my WinXP. Freakin' Microsoft OS, screws up everything. ;-p But I gotta say, these new LED-backlit screens are pretty faboo.
