There have been a plethora of hard drive problems I’ve had to deal with this year. In the past two days, I’ve had to repeat the wonderful Windows XP installation/update process three times – once for one of my servers (Windows XP/Apache2.2/PHP/MySQL stack) and twice for client systems whose hard drives just up and quit.
In January, my cousin’s P3/733 gave up the ghost in the same way – rather than buying a new hard drive and installing Windows again, he opted to go out and get a MacBook. It ended up costing him a bit more than he wanted to spend, but the system works for him now instead of Media Player giving a “Windows Genuine Advantage” failure every time he tried to play a video file. (Admittedly, I’m unsure exactly where this XP copy came from, but it shouldn’t prevent him from launching a previous version, like v10, of Media Player.) In the meantime, he ended up using VLC to play all video files. After attempting to reset the product key to a known, valid one, both using Microsoft’s official key change application and a widely-known registry patch: