Remember not so long ago I was trying to decide if Vista should stay or go?

Well it looks like it has made it’s own decisions and this evening rebooted itself into an irrecoverable state claiming upon reboot that the ATA driver was missing which means no hard disks!

But hang on. My recent backups have all been made using Vistas own backup feature so will not simply restore onto an XP machine. But not a problem because I can just access said backups from my desktop Vista machine.

Oh no.

It looks like even though Vista has been reporting successful backups each evening, they are actually corrupt.

So now we need to gain access to the drive that will not boot. But also remember that this drive is protected using BitLocker! Things are about to get interesting.

So Windows recovery would work.

Windows repair won’t work.

My final option is to delete the boot partition (my documents are on a secondary partition), reinstall Vista and then try and access the documents partition.

So eyes shut, I delete the primary partition. Select the empty space for Vista to install on and hold tight.

Once into the new Vista we go to BitLocker and it shows the secondary partition as “access denied”. But here comes the good bit.

When I enabled BitLocker, I saved the backup keys to a UBS stick and chucked it into the safe. Sure enough, when I gave Vista said USB stick it unlocked my files and they are now downloading onto an external drive.

Phew.

So all I can think is that somewhere on my Dell D630 there is a hardware fault maybe around one of the hard drive controllers. A fault that only shows itself in Vista and not XP! I do know that internal IT will not even look at whilst it has Vista on it and of course if it works with XP then the answer will be “no fault found”.

So it looks like my little D630 is destined to spend the rest of it’s life as an XP box. That said, at least if it is true to form it will be a reliable little work horse.