Big Trev

Upon rebooting (see previous), the bugger then decided it no longer wanted to boot.  On recovery mode, I was getting errors along the lines of:

ata3.00:failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x40)

Turns out (after a bit of googling on the lappy) that this is something to do with hard drives not being recognised properly.  There’s a bit of to and fro in this thread which I found.

Anyhoo, I unplugged my SATA drive (the one with Windows on it, so my umbilical cord is officially cut!), and disabled the "extra" IDE ports (this is one of those motherboards with an extra controller on it - I think it’s a P35 mobo), and set something to do with "compatibililty mode" in BIOS, and it’s booted OK.

Lets see how it goes now….

First up, I’m going to try running through the instructions on this site to try this thing called Virtualbox (sounds impressive).  I’m not going to even try and go through the instructions here, but I’ll put in any extra little snippets which I’ve had to tweak to get the thing to work.  I’ll be using Outlook 2003…

To install it, I’ll use the installer in Add/Remove programs (I’m still not comfortable in the command line!).  It shows up in the repositories, but having a look at it, I’m not sure if it’s a late enough version….

…

Crap, no it isn’t.  It’s version 1.50, which I uninstalled and grabbed the latest version after finding my way here.

Did the changes to the network binding per the instructions, which hosed my network connection as promised, so I rebooted.  Then more fun started….