How Do You Spell That?

One of the machines I use on a "semi-daily" basis has had problems for a while, which can be traced to a bad hard drive. So over the past few weeks I've been tearing it apart trying to figure out WTF was going on (after replacing the harddrive). Today, I figured it out.

Last night, in a fit of rage thinking my CD ROM was DOA, I decided to try to install abother operating system on my machine. You see, when the XP disk was inserted, all sorts of weird noises and buzzing came from the CD-ROM, which would then say "No OS found, have a bad day".

So late last night (after the kids were in bed, hell, after everyone was) I slapped in a small distro of Debian Linux to see if it would install. Within an hour, the system was up and running. So OK, something just needed a kick, go ahead and try the XP install again. Nope, same weird noises. OK, grab different disk of XP and try again. Same result.

talk to Derek this morning and he recommended RedHat since I'm what you would call "clueless" about Linux. grab the iso's, burn them, and an hour later the box is running Fedora. Put in the XP CD once again? Same sounds.

I've got a third disk of XP lying around somewhere. If it has the same reject symptoms, then I'm going to slap this thing on EBay so that some Linux guru can us it in their office.