No longer ACPI complient.............WHY?

That's great George! Thanks for posting it so others can possibly benefit from your experience.

I was beginning to break out in a cold sweat! We were near the end of the rope. It looks like the ACPI compliant error message was indeed a red herring.

The last time I had a big head scratcher like this it turned out that my 80 cond. ATA IDE cable had went south on me. You never expect a drive cable to fail unless maybe you've been yanking or moving it around. Mine just died while at rest ...in its sleep you might say. I took me all the way to past my bedtime to finally figure it out. These one-eyed monsters can really get under your hide at times.

Keep that XXCLONE software and learn all about it. It's good stuff! You'll notice it makes a copy of your Registry for backups everytime you do a clone job and puts the copy on both the target and the source. A nice touch. When cloning, just be careful and verify that you have the target and source selected correctly. It will really disappoint you if you set it backwards like I did once. Copied my empty drive to the boot drive - real smart move.

You're a little younger than I so stick around and you'll mature into a real guru at this stuff.

All the best.

 

Ha!! I didn't think there was anyone older than me out there!!! But it kinda bums me out that I don't know exactly what the problem was, and exactly how I cured it. I have a term for what I did, it's called "shotgunning ". It's a desperation move that has stood me in good stead over the years. I am retired since 1998, and kinda isolated from any computer geeks in my area, but I do love piddling with these beasts. In the past year I've gotten into overclocking and currently have an AMD 165 Opteron running stable at 2.8 gigs. Good thing I don't have a lot of money to buy parts with! These forums are a wealth of information with guys like you willing to share what you know.
I salute you!