Blagged

You know what ruins a Sunday afternoon?  Turning on your Xbox 360 and finding out you’ve lost all of your game saves because the hard drive has crashed.  It’s partially my fault I lost everything though… about a year ago when I had to penny trick my 360, it was sitting on top of my loudspeaker without the case on it.  One of my cats decided it would be hilarious to jump up and knock the system onto the floor while it was running.  Ever since then I’ve been telling myself I should buy a memory card and copy my game saves to it as a backup.  Looks like procrastination has finally come back to kick me in the ass.  RIP 20GB drive, hello 60GB drive.

I have a question… since when is NTFS not the same as NTFS?  Anyone?  I recently received Red Alert 3 as a birthday gift, but for whatever reason, it wouldn’t run in my current install of Windows Vista.  I decided that since the games take up so much space any how, I would create a new partition on my drive and load it up with Vista, then install all of my games there.  When I want to play, I’ll just boot up the gaming install of Vista and the games can run in a clean environment.

Anyways, I used Acronis Disk Director to shrink my current Windows partition to make room for the new one.  Then I create the new partition and format it with NTFS using Disk Director.  Here’s where it gets messed up.  I installed the new copy of Vista, but didn’t format the partition using the Vista setup since it was already formatted using Disk Director.  Vista installed fine, but I found that I couldn’t install any software.  Any setup file, would complain about not having access to the temp folder.

After some searching, I found many people having the same problem.  I started the Vista setup from CD again, but this time formatted the partition right in the Vista setup and all is well.  So, pro tip for the day; if you’re using Disk Director to create a new partition for a Vista install, make sure you format the partition using the tool provided in Vista’s setup and not with Disk Director!