GOTCHA - Intel Application Accelerator V2.2 and HDD upgrade

[ashleys]

With the impending demise of 2.5" PATA production (Hitachi having already stopped), I decided to upgrade the disk on my (over 5 year old) T30.
This machine is now used as a "hot spare" for my desktop, should that run into trouble. It wasn't worth buying a 250GB WD Scorpio but a 160GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 seemed to fit the bill.
This would replace a 100GB Hitachi Travelstar. The significance of the disk sizes will become apparent later.

My T30 system is effectively a clone of the desktop,
C: system partition with only OS and program files
D: All user data

Backed up C: with Acronis TI and swapped drives over.
Partitioned new drive and restored with Acronis, without a hitch.

When booting for the first time, Windows hung after the splash screen. Wondered if the restore was suspect, so restored it again.
Exactly the same problem.
The week before, I'd taken a backup of C: with RnR, so I thought I'd restore that. Restore worked fine but yet again, it hung after the splash screen. Worst than that, Windows would hang up when booting into Safe Mode as well.

At this point decided to to a clean install. This would be a good opportunity to remove a load of junk that had accumulated on the machine and drop some of the unused ThinkPad software. All went well and I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of the Seagate drive.

At the end of all of this I decided to install the Intel Application Accelerator software, as I had that installed before. Having installed it, the first re-boot caused the hang after the splash screen. Fortunately, the "Last known configuration" option at boot time worked a treat and I was able to re-boot and remove Application Accelerator.

Digging around on the Intel site it appears that V2.2 of Application Accelerator had problems reported against it when using WD drives that were greater than 137GB. I suspect that, in fact, it was any drives greater than 137GB. On my previous system I had V2.2 installed and that's what I had installed again. So, the culprit was definitely identified. However, V2.3 that fixed the problem cannot be installed on the T30 as the Ultra IDE controller (82801CAM) is not supported by V2.3 of Application Accelerator.

So a word to the wise, if you have Intel Application Accelerator V2.2 currently installed and you plan to migrate to a drive larger than 137GB, remove it before you migrate.