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Jul. 9th, 2003 11:50 pmAll told, a very frustrating day.
Jason, at the same comp show he purchased my new 30gig primary drive and the extra memory for my ailing beasty, picked up a copy of Windows XP Home for himself. His current machine is a fourth generation custom from my innocuous little workshop, a 1ghz Athlon on a Tyan Trinity mainboard, that up until this morning was running Windows 98 Second Edition... BADLY. Over the last few months, his install/uninstall habits had destabilized it to the point where it would almost crash if you looked at it cross-eyed, so it was due for a reinstall anyway.
That's where I come in. Again. Jason is hexed, you see... there's no such thing as a 'simple install' on his equipment. It doesn't matter that his peripherals are damn near identical to mine, or to Dan's... what should be a clean and simple matter inevitably becomes a hopeless multi-day mire. But he's a good lad, and a valued friend, so I agreed without fuss. He turned up at the door around 11:15am, and we bopped back down to his place.
On the way, we stopped at a Best Buy, where he surprised me with a new Diablo Battlechest, to remedy my ailing cds and get me back online. And while the gift was marvelous, I knew in the pit of my stomach that disaster was lurking. Just ONCE I'd like that feeling to be wrong.
I backed up everything, even going so far as to take the drive with the archived materials physically out of the machine during the upgrade. WinXP Home installed flawlessly. The video drivers installed with nary a complaint. Modem and Sound drivers never so much as murmured a protest. Outlook Express 6 imported all of his old mail without fail, and Internet Explorer 6 soaked up his bookmarks like they'd always been there. The PowerDVD software played a movie without a stutter or hiccough; the first time his machine had -ever- done that, I later learned.
I should have run like hell.
Instead, emboldened by the success of everything, Jason handed me the gem cases containing Mechwarrior 4 and all of the expansions and addons; it's one of his favorite games, and one he'd been unable to play before. In fact, being able to play MW4 is one of the reasons he shelled out $110 for XP Home. I shrugged, popped it in, and kicked off the install. Two minutes into the install, the entire machine just blips off. Just... because it felt like it.
Odd. Cycled the power, and it booted back up, pausing briefly to run ScanDisk on the boot partition. Nothing major turned up, so I (foolishly) shrugged it off as a fluke and fired the install back up. At the SAME EXACT POINT the machine again blipped off.
Very odd. I'll note at this point that MW4 is =ALSO= a Microsoft product.
I'll note at this point that I cycled the power on the machine again, it flipped through the POST routines, and then... halted. Without an error, or a cursor, or anything. The fans idled, as did the cd drives. And then two of the three hard drives idled. Hrm. Rebooted again, and it did the same thing. The cursing started. Slapped the XP cd back into the drive, set it to boot from the cdrom, and it hung. Again. I wobbled out the back door to puff a cigarette and sift through everything that could possibly go wrong.
Ripped it all out, fought with the partitioning to get the NT/XP signature off the drive, nothing seemed to work. We couldn't even get the installer to kick over. In desperation, I took all but the primary hard drive (there are three) and the primary cd drive (there are two) offline, and it installed clean and seemed happy. Hardware was slowly added back into the mix, a piece at a time, and it seemed happy still. Fine. Great. Reinstalled all the drivers, got the email transferred, got the bookmarks over, got SimpleMU reinstalled. Everything worked. 'Jason, take me home. I'm tired, I'm cranky, and I want to be a -my- computer'.
He dropped me off here about an hour ago. About halfway through writing this, the phone rang (at 11:40 at night?! WTF?!): It was Jason. The machine had blipped off again. And wouldn't reboot again. But as I started this post, it occured to me that the one -major- difference between his machine and mine is how the drives are mapped out. I've the traditional 4 IDE devices, two per channel. If I need more, I'll throw a Wide-SCSI adapter in and add more drives that way.
Jason opted about a year back to put a fifth IDE device in, necessitating the purchase of a tertiary IDE controller card. And the thought finally crystalized in my mind, after hours of fighting with it, that if that addon card were fighting for control of the primary IDE bus, it would.... TA DA! hang the machine just coming out of POST, because it wouldn't know which to chose. I instructed Jas to pull the ribbon cable from the bottom-most drive, remembering it to be the one hooked to the addon... and it booted clean.
The tragic part is that had I thought of it six hours ago, I could've saved us both a lot of heartache. *sigh*
Well, now that I've shared with you all just how badly my technical skills have slid into the toilet, I've a quizzie that came from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kangitanka3...
The Angel. Born of light and goodness, you care for
all others as that is your destiny. Some think
you can be taken advantage of, but you know
that all need to be cared for at sometime.
What is the Dominant Inner being within You?
brought to you by Quizilla
*wozzles*
Right. I'm going to nip off and ... strum my harp or something...
*hugs*
~Ellie-chan
Jason, at the same comp show he purchased my new 30gig primary drive and the extra memory for my ailing beasty, picked up a copy of Windows XP Home for himself. His current machine is a fourth generation custom from my innocuous little workshop, a 1ghz Athlon on a Tyan Trinity mainboard, that up until this morning was running Windows 98 Second Edition... BADLY. Over the last few months, his install/uninstall habits had destabilized it to the point where it would almost crash if you looked at it cross-eyed, so it was due for a reinstall anyway.
That's where I come in. Again. Jason is hexed, you see... there's no such thing as a 'simple install' on his equipment. It doesn't matter that his peripherals are damn near identical to mine, or to Dan's... what should be a clean and simple matter inevitably becomes a hopeless multi-day mire. But he's a good lad, and a valued friend, so I agreed without fuss. He turned up at the door around 11:15am, and we bopped back down to his place.
On the way, we stopped at a Best Buy, where he surprised me with a new Diablo Battlechest, to remedy my ailing cds and get me back online. And while the gift was marvelous, I knew in the pit of my stomach that disaster was lurking. Just ONCE I'd like that feeling to be wrong.
I backed up everything, even going so far as to take the drive with the archived materials physically out of the machine during the upgrade. WinXP Home installed flawlessly. The video drivers installed with nary a complaint. Modem and Sound drivers never so much as murmured a protest. Outlook Express 6 imported all of his old mail without fail, and Internet Explorer 6 soaked up his bookmarks like they'd always been there. The PowerDVD software played a movie without a stutter or hiccough; the first time his machine had -ever- done that, I later learned.
I should have run like hell.
Instead, emboldened by the success of everything, Jason handed me the gem cases containing Mechwarrior 4 and all of the expansions and addons; it's one of his favorite games, and one he'd been unable to play before. In fact, being able to play MW4 is one of the reasons he shelled out $110 for XP Home. I shrugged, popped it in, and kicked off the install. Two minutes into the install, the entire machine just blips off. Just... because it felt like it.
Odd. Cycled the power, and it booted back up, pausing briefly to run ScanDisk on the boot partition. Nothing major turned up, so I (foolishly) shrugged it off as a fluke and fired the install back up. At the SAME EXACT POINT the machine again blipped off.
Very odd. I'll note at this point that MW4 is =ALSO= a Microsoft product.
I'll note at this point that I cycled the power on the machine again, it flipped through the POST routines, and then... halted. Without an error, or a cursor, or anything. The fans idled, as did the cd drives. And then two of the three hard drives idled. Hrm. Rebooted again, and it did the same thing. The cursing started. Slapped the XP cd back into the drive, set it to boot from the cdrom, and it hung. Again. I wobbled out the back door to puff a cigarette and sift through everything that could possibly go wrong.
Ripped it all out, fought with the partitioning to get the NT/XP signature off the drive, nothing seemed to work. We couldn't even get the installer to kick over. In desperation, I took all but the primary hard drive (there are three) and the primary cd drive (there are two) offline, and it installed clean and seemed happy. Hardware was slowly added back into the mix, a piece at a time, and it seemed happy still. Fine. Great. Reinstalled all the drivers, got the email transferred, got the bookmarks over, got SimpleMU reinstalled. Everything worked. 'Jason, take me home. I'm tired, I'm cranky, and I want to be a -my- computer'.
He dropped me off here about an hour ago. About halfway through writing this, the phone rang (at 11:40 at night?! WTF?!): It was Jason. The machine had blipped off again. And wouldn't reboot again. But as I started this post, it occured to me that the one -major- difference between his machine and mine is how the drives are mapped out. I've the traditional 4 IDE devices, two per channel. If I need more, I'll throw a Wide-SCSI adapter in and add more drives that way.
Jason opted about a year back to put a fifth IDE device in, necessitating the purchase of a tertiary IDE controller card. And the thought finally crystalized in my mind, after hours of fighting with it, that if that addon card were fighting for control of the primary IDE bus, it would.... TA DA! hang the machine just coming out of POST, because it wouldn't know which to chose. I instructed Jas to pull the ribbon cable from the bottom-most drive, remembering it to be the one hooked to the addon... and it booted clean.
The tragic part is that had I thought of it six hours ago, I could've saved us both a lot of heartache. *sigh*
Well, now that I've shared with you all just how badly my technical skills have slid into the toilet, I've a quizzie that came from
kangitanka3...The Angel. Born of light and goodness, you care for
all others as that is your destiny. Some think
you can be taken advantage of, but you know
that all need to be cared for at sometime.
What is the Dominant Inner being within You?
brought to you by Quizilla
*wozzles*
Right. I'm going to nip off and ... strum my harp or something...
*hugs*
~Ellie-chan
