My very sh-t upgrade, let's go kill all the I.T. companies!!!NOW!

[Mad-Mike]

Oh the joys of experimentation, and expensive brand new hardware. The joys of non-working resources, jittery video, and problems that once never existed, all because of a stupid little 80GB Hard Drive!

It all started on thursday then I got this "genius" idea to try out the Windows Vista beta just for a short span (about 30 minutes it turned out). So I decided to take this as a chance to upgrade my hard drive, as I was running out of space, little did I know, I'd end up losing EVERYTHING I had on the last drive out of stupid error and sleepiness, and end up spending all day tied to a bloody chair trying to get the goddamn machine working back the way it was!

So I dump off my old 40G, install it as the slave, install the 80GB as the master, and then install WIndows 2000, ok, everything is fine now. So I try to install Linux, now there's 2 problems, 1, I apparently, back in my days of inexperience with badly labeled el-cheapo modern piece-of-shit motherboards (of a brand that rhymes with fandell), I had the hard disks on the secondardy master and slave, and not the primary (explaining why Linux was seeing it as HDC0), and second off, I could not, for the life of me, get the boot loader on Drive C from Fedora Core 5, no matter what I tried! GRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

So I wound up ditching the 40GB hard disk drive, and by this time it was 5 in the afternoon, I had gotten up at around 10:00 in the morning that day! All friday long I spent, unplugging, re-plugging, uninstalling, reinstalling, partitioning, and trying over and over again to get my old dual boot Windows 2000/Fedora Core setup back, by 2:30 A.M., I had FINALLY gotten win2000 on the 80GB HDD, and Fedora Core started to install, both of which were taking in an insanely long period of time..........

All day saturday was more of the same old story......uninstall-reinstall, nothing but problems, this continued through Sunday, now it's almost monday, one day before I go back to work, and I'm about to just put a bullet through this damned thing and go back to my 486! At least my 486 runs right after a reformat and a reinstall, I've never met such a bunch of shit working on a computer in my life! My god, if this is what they call quality now, the manufacturers and bite me!

So here's all the problems I have yet to be resolved........

- Windows 2000 "stuttering", meaning, programs are taking awhile to load, because the whole damn system stops responding for a couple of milliseconds, then goes back to normal, than stops responding again, then goes back to normal, and keeps this crap up!

- On-Line video and audio, and other multimedia content is choppy! So when I get on youtube now to see something, it's all choppy and crap! Same goes for google video, and I can't listen to winamp and work anymore either, choppy there, it would be fine if this were a 486 or a Pentium 200, but on a 1 GIGAHERTZ PENTIUM III I EXPECT IT TO GO FASTER!

- Udev in Linux is not working properly. It sticks on Udev at boot for about 30 seconds then sais "Udev Timeout" [failure] will continue in background or something like that! So far I've been to 6 different forums looking for information on it, not a damn one of the solutions fixed the problem!

- Linux is running damn slow because udev is running in the background all the time! Explain how something like a simple ATA hard disk could cause this little junket of code to keep on hunting or doing something? What the hell does Udev do, poll every device in the machine?

Either way, 4 days just to upgrade a stupid mother****in' hard drive, sorry if my profanity is high, but I'm at the end of my ropes with this thing, my next solution is to just take it out skeet shootin' and the GEM is the target!

Basically, I miss the old hardware, back when you could follow instructions, and things would work PROPERLY! Now it's like you follow instructions, and there's a BIOS issue here, or a motherboard issue there. I think the IT industry needs an enema, and while where at it, so do the End users too!

and no I'm not that german brat, my keyboard still has all it's keys, I've managed to contain phsyical damage to only the mere software and hardware vendors in my mind that I'd love to come in and massacre in various very mean and rather nasty ways. I'm just tired of toiling on this thing day in and day out, and needless to say, I need a friggin break. It's driving me nuts because I like to know what's causing these problems, but there's no explaination! I've looked for all the answers, and they just don't exist.

[mbbrutman]

I took the liberty of making a slight edit to the topic line. It is good of you to express yourself freely ...

My rant .. I wasted 6 hours of my life debugging what looked like a flakey Ethernet card. Try to get support on something close to twenty years old when the company doesn't do ethernet cards, you are using free software, you are using DOS, and the card is grafted onto a machine that it was never designed to run on. Needless to say, I was SOL.

Figured it out this morning - bad parameter. It was the machine, not the card that was flaking out. A simple parameter change cured all.

[chuckcmagee]

Right now, I only have an idea on the stuttering deal. Likely you have already done this.... Bring up the system error log and look for "floods of errors" - i.e. same error over and over with same date-time on them. I had that for the acpi controller on 2 machines, no less. Granted, my situation was hardware but that's the only case I have seen where it freezes and unfreezes, round and round.

[chuckcmagee]

And I know it won't help but when I was just learning linux, it tried out the "mkfs2" command ---- let's see what this does. ZAPPPP - First few hundred sectors of my No Backup C partition goooone. I turned the power off fast, but of course, not fast enough. I then spent the next few days attempted to recreate the lost files on my C drive.

And I can't count the times I have tried to move a Windows hard drive from one machine to another, only to have the 2nd machine destroy my disk because of different disk geometry or other motherboard parms.

As usual, I guess the bottom line is to take the time and run Norton Ghost on all the partitions and save the partition table before screwing around with new stuff. I know, nobody does all that.

[bbcmicro]

Playing a fairly intensive game on my dell optiplex gx150, It crashes and so I have to do a hard reset, On restart, my laptop CD ROM dead, no response from known working one I used with it. 2 weeks after tinkering around on and off trying to remedy the situation, I part it. Very annoying!

[Mad-Mike]

Amazing what a nights sleep can bring...................

I just figured it out, the Cache was incorrectly configured in the BIOS, how it was changed is anybody's guess, because i know I did'nt, unless I messed it up inadvertently when I corrected the Other BIOS setting I know I did mess up as it no longer applied (aka. Primary Booting Hard Drive was set to DIsabled, as the original primary, had been removed). Turns out one of the Cache's was turned to Write-Thru instead of Write-Back, apparently, the CPU was trying to run the Cache the wrong way. I still wonder, how could that setting have changed? And is this the root to Udev messing up.....I got to check it out. One thing's for sure, the system runs fine now.

[Mad-Mike]

Right now, I only have an idea on the stuttering deal. Likely you have already done this.... Bring up the system error log and look for "floods of errors" - i.e. same error over and over with same date-time on them. I had that for the acpi controller on 2 machines, no less. Granted, my situation was hardware but that's the only case I have seen where it freezes and unfreezes, round and round.

What's so funny it it was a familiar symptom, but I forgot it was from that other time I fooled around with the internal and external Cache in the BIOS. I just could not place it because the Cache is usually the last thing I think about, I was worried I'd dropped a screw inadvertently in between my RAM or something.

[dreddnott]

Cheer up, Mike, there's a lot of wisdom in the mistakes that you made, at least you won't be making them again! Look on the bright side.

BTW, if you're having problems with Linux, just recompile the kernel to better suit your system. You typically don't need built-in support of even a module for initrd (initial RAM drive environment) if you don't need the kernel to be portable to other systems. That alone can make things a lot sleeker. Of course, I'm not too familiar with the typical layout of a Fedora system, I've only used older RedHat versions (and currently Debian 3.1).

Recompiling your kernel is EASY. I swear!

I did have a rough time myself recently - it was with my primary system (Athlon 64 3400+ 2.4GHz, ATI X800 GTO, 2GB DDR400), the pride of my collection.

From what I've been able to tell, based on the chain of events, either the VIA motherboard's chipset was going bad or the VIA IDE driver for 64-bit Windows doesn't quite talk to the hard disk drives properly. Anyways, it's VIA's fault, and let me start from the top:

I had an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 333MHz FSB Barton core chip on a nice Abit motherboard, 512MB of DDR400 RAM (only running at 333MHz), ATI Radeon 9500 Pro, a primary 40GB HDD for the OS and a secondary 120GB (which held all of my MP3s and games).

The cheap power supply in this case exploded violently, destroying both the motherboard and the processor (I was able to figure this out pretty quick by swapping parts because I had another Athlon XP 2500+ system on the opposite desk). Fortunately, none of the other parts had been damaged at all, so dad and I moseyed on down to the Pomona Computer Fair, picking ourselves up a top-of-the-line AMD Athlon 64 3400+. At 2.4GHz, this was the highest-clocked 754-pin CPU available, and since dual-channel doesn't increase performance very much, we snapped it up along with another Abit motherboard and a 580W PSU.

I slap the new motherboard and processor in the old case, with the old RAM, video card, and hard drives, and it works like a charm. Since we're running Windows 2000 Pro, there are no issues with activation or any real driver problems.

The system's rock solid for over a year, and then the x86-64 editions of Windows XP and Server 2003 were released. I'd been meaning to get ahold of the trial edition of Server 2003, but I was instead fortunate enough to get an actual copy of the real deal, 64-bit Standard edition.

I installed a second 40GB HDD with the intention of dual-booting between my old copy of Windows 2000 and the new copy of 2003, but when I was done installing and setting up Server 2003, which went pretty much without incident, when I went to try booting Windows 2000 from the menu instead, it claimed that the registry was bad. Sure enough, most of the registry and related .DAT files were as scrambled as could be and nonrecoverable (with no unaffected backup files, tragically).

None of the non-OS data had been affected, so I unhappily blamed Microsoft and went about my merry way relying solely on my new 64-bit operating system. This was fine for a while but I noticed that occasionally one or more of the HDDs in my system were reading and writing EXTREMELY slowly. I checked in Device Manager and it turned out that it was locking the affected drives in PIO mode! PIO mode is a very slow and obsolete way of accessing a hard drive, and apparently both 40GB drives were somewhat incompatible with PIO mode writes.

Switching IDE cables and/or master-slave jumpers temporarily fixed the problem, sometimes, but it always seemed to come back.
Once in a while, the computer wouldn't even try to boot from the hard drive (the boot.ini menu and NTLDR stuff was installed on the primary master 40GB, and it pointed to E:, the active partition on the secondary 40GB with 2003), instead just hanging forever (or sometimes for just a minute).

I also had been getting occasional visual glitches in the BIOS, and it didn't seem like the video card was at fault. I blamed the system memory and upgraded from 512MB to two 1GB sticks. Nothing changed. I started getting scrambly letters in the BIOS IDE auto-detect hard drive description strings.

Then the MFT on the primary 40GB was suddenly completely scrambled. I blamed overheating, as at the time I was placing the hard drives in adjacent 3.5" bays, all touching each other, and I'd not upgraded to my ThermalTake Armor case yet. I removed the drive which had a great deal of old personal data on it, placing it in my still-functional Athlon XP 2500+ system. CHKDSK tried to run every time Windows 2000 booted on it, but failed every time, not even recognising it as an NTFS partition.

Meanwhile, on the Athlon 64 system, I'm unable to boot at all, because NTLDR and boot.ini and all those other wonderful joyful bootifying files are gone for all eternity. I was eventually able to jumpstart the situation by hopping into Recovery Console mode, but now I had no C: at all, just an E: for my first hard drive partition! A little silly. Also, when I installed Windows on the 40GB in the first place, I hadn't altered the partition setup, which only gave 18GB to the first partition, so things were starting to get a little cramped for my poor operating system.

I soldiered on anyways, managing to recover all of the data from the supposedly overheated 40GB drive, without any hiccups, thanks to a couple of absolutely fantastic data recovery programs that are well worth the price (Ontrack recovery pro, and if you're on a budget, File Scavenger works great as well). Then I noticed that the Athlon 64 was starting to suffer odd bouts of data corruption on the 40GB. The first couple times I was lucky and Windows File Protection restored the files, but then it took out the whole print spooler, completely removing my ability to print locally or over the network, and I was like "Hey, I'm keeping my drives extra cool in this expensive new case I bought just to keep my drives from overheating! What gives?" I was also suspicious because the old 40GB drive was fine in the other PC, although it still looked scrambled to Windows.

Since I was still getting the PIO mode popping up, and my shiny new X800 GTO card was no longer working in that board (the old 9500 Pro worked, and the X800 GTO worked in the Athlon XP system), I concluded that it was the stupid VIA motherboard's fault and I picked me up a nice shiny SiS board from PC Club for $40. It had more features and internal and external connectors and I haven't had a single problem with it, whereas with the old VIA chipset I'd have intermittent issues with USB and expansion cards as well as hard drive data modes.

I haven't had a problem since and I consider myself particularly fortunate not to have had, say, my 60GB collection of MP3s corrupted, or the Windows 2003 installation completely wiped out.

Speaking of which, later on down the road, I bought a 160GB drive from trueCycle and installed that as my primary (C:), considering it well worth my time to reinstall the operating system just to get a decently-sized OS drive with one partition on it. Since most of the important stuff was either on the 120GB secondary master drive or the scrambled 40GB drive that had its data recovered to one or more of the Athlon XP system's HDDs, everything went very smoothly.

I also bought another 160GB drive and put it in an external USB case to take advantage of broadband internet access wherever I go, since my monster machine of real ultimate power is otherwise trapped in dial-up purgatory.

[dreddnott]

My apologies, that turned out to be a BIT longer than I had expected, thanks to this little tiny textbox they give you for quick reply.

I guess I type a little faster on this IBM Model M keyboard than I should be allowed to get away with!

[Mad-Mike]

My apologies, that turned out to be a BIT longer than I had expected, thanks to this little tiny textbox they give you for quick reply.

I guess I type a little faster on this IBM Model M keyboard than I should be allowed to get away with!

No prob, most of my posts are long because I've grown WAY too accustomed to this Northgate Omnikey 102 keyboard I've had for the last 5 years.

I managed to fix the problem via internal Cache. I don't know what changed the setting in the first place, but oh well.