OT: Computer's...gotta hate 'em.

[Renegade 13]

Today I was repairing the power supply on my computer...unfortunately in the process of doing this, I restarted and shut off the computer many times, and not the way they like it. Using the power button to kill it quite often. Unfortunately, when I then proceeded to restart the computer after I was finished, the computer had this nice, pleasant message for me, something along the lines of "You didn't shut down your computer properly, so here's some options:

Restart, safe mode.
Restart, normally.

Naturally, I pick Normal. Whoops, sorry, no can do. Continues the boot and restarts the computer. Brings me to the same screen. Alright, normal didn't work so I'll try Safe. Nope, can't do that either. Restarts the computer and brings me to that same infernal screen again. Nothing I could think of doing next, so I inserted the "XP Home Recovery CD" that came with the computer. No problem, it does its thing, starts reinstalling Windows. Great, no problem. Except now comes the problem...it begins formatting the hard drive. I had absolutely no backups for anything on my hard drive. Nothing. At all. Zippo. /threads/images/Graemlins/Cold.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/evil.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif

So now I have a functioning computer, but with nothing at all on it. Nothing. Oh many things can be installed, sure. Of course, all my pictures, partially created shipsets, original shipset files, everything is gone. I really really really really hate windows. There's no reason for the g**damn thing to f*** up this bad just because it wasn't shut down properly a few times. I just wanna beat my head into a really solid surface for a while. But I won't. I'll go reinstall what I can, and beat my head on a wall after that's done for all the stuff I can't replace... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif

[Jack Simth]

Ran into something vaguely similar once with restarting in MS dos mode - seems at some point it backed up the DOS boot autoexec.bat over the backup for getting it back into Windows Boot mode. I was able to repair the thing, but then, it was merely Windows 98.

A suggestion (for next time, unfortunately):
1) Get a CD-R(or CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW), separate from a CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM) drive.
2) Get (or download/burn) a live Linux CD/DVD - bootable CD/DVD that won't try to install onto the hard disk (such as Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/)) (DVD works too, but they are more fragile)
3) Make multiple copies of the Live Linux CD/DVD
4) Double-check to make certain your machine will boot from a CD/DVD drive (and test it with the Live Linux CD/DVD).
5) Next time this happens, boot up with the Linux CD, and burn everything you want to keep to CD before reinstalling the OS.

[Atrocities]

Do you have restore points? I had to restore mine a couple of times because of power failures. To bad there isn't a way to protect your PC if your power supply HD fails. A back up power supply that can slowly power down your system if your main power supply HD fails. (If The power supply in your computer fails, but you still have power.)

[Thermodyne]

WTF did you format it? Didn’t you know that it would wipe your drive?

Classic case of “I can fix this” fubars a rig.

You should have done a repair to the boot loader. Stick an XP cd in and select repair from the menu. Actually you shouldn’t have been aborting the startup-shutdown process, then you wouldn’t have hose’d the boot loader. If your stuffs worth $500 and a month without the drive, send it off and have it recovered. Then spend $9.95 on an XP book and read up on the errors of your ways. XP does a ton of house keeping during the shutdown process, maintaining the boot files being part of this. This was user error, not a windows flaw.

Get a copy of Ghost and do some backup images. That way you can always reset to a previous state.

[Suicide Junkie]

It would also be a good idea to ditch emoticon OS, and get an upgrade to win98 or 2k.

[Renegade 13]

Of course I knew goddamn well formatting it would wipe the hard drive. As I mentioned, the XP restore disk I had did the formatting ON ITS OWN. I did not tell it to format. There was no menu to select "repair" from. Put the CD in the drive, boots automatically from the drive, starts the formatting automatically, no input from me involved. Nothing I could do once the "Recovery" disk was in...

Not worth recovering the data. As mentioned, it's personal stuff, pictures, shipsets, etc. Can't justify the expense to recover.

I know this was an issue of user error, but there is an aspect of poor design in this. Power failures don't exactly let XP do it's thing upon shutdown. Evidently, a power failure could [censored] things up as well, if what I did was sufficient to do it. It should be designed so the boot files aren't messed around with upon shutdown. I'm no expert (obviously) but it seems like there should be little need to, unless maybe there was a software change.

In this case "I can fix this" did fix it. It wrecked the data I had, but having a functioning computer with no data is better than a [censored] up computer that won't even boot! Sure, the problem was caused by me, but I'll be damned if I'll spend $60 per hour to get someone to fix it for me!

Live and learn. Backup data, have a real XP CD, not some bull**** "Recovery" CD that comes with the computer...

[Fyron]

What kind of "recovery" CD was this? If it was provided by an OEM, it is possible that it has a config file that is set to say yes to some or all of the installation prompts, such as "format the drive and install, even if an install already exists." You'd have to have a pretty stupid OEM to do that, but you never know...

Renegade: You should probably throw the "recovery" CD in the face of the head of the company that made your comp, then demand a real XP CD sans the garbage config file.

OSes shouldn't be managing boot files willy-nilly during the normal shutdown process... The boot files don't need to change unless you change your hardware or kernel files, which certainly doesn't happen every time you are running the OS. That's just asking for trouble, and definitely a Windows flaw if true.

Note that he never said he was turning it off while shutting down, but rather while booting up. Killing the bootup early on isn't an issue, since all its doing is reading data and building up RAM files. Perhaps not good due to mild stress on the drive, but definitely not going to kill Windows at this point.

Don't forget that NTFS is a journalling file system. It doesn't let files be written to the real location until they are completely on the drive...

[Suicide Junkie]

Oh, and before you get too far into the reinstallation process;

***Partition your Drive***

Never let windows sit on the same drive letter as your irreplacable stuff.

[Sivran]

Well, the OS is already installed from what I gather. However, all is not lost. He could upgrade to any other version of Windows, or, he could get hold of Partition Logic. (http://visopsys.org/partlogic/)

Since I'm plugging Partition Logic, I may as well mention the site where I discovered its existence: The OSSWin project (http://osswin.sourceforge.net/) ... lots of F/OSS for windows. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Renegade 13]

Imperator Fyron said:
What kind of "recovery" CD was this? If it was provided by an OEM, it is possible that it has a config file that is set to say yes to some or all of the installation prompts, such as "format the drive and install, even if an install already exists." You'd have to have a pretty stupid OEM to do that, but you never know...

Renegade: You should probably throw the "recovery" CD in the face of the head of the company that made your comp, then demand a real XP CD sans the garbage config file.


Yep, it was provided by the OEM. I should send 'em the CD and tell them where to stick it...I've reinstalled OS's before, and always just had them reinstall over the existing installation. Easy, no data lost. I (foolishly, it seems) trusted that this recovery CD would allow me to do the same. I think I will be having a little chat the company, and see if I can get a real copy of XP.


Note that he never said he was turning it off while shutting down, but rather while booting up. Killing the bootup early on isn't an issue, since all its doing is reading data and building up RAM files. Perhaps not good due to mild stress on the drive, but definitely not going to kill Windows at this point.


That's exactly what happened. I never shut down during the shutdown procedure, only during the start-up, which I had done before with no ill effects, assuming it would have no ill effects again...

SJ, I will be partitioning the drive into a purely windows drive and an "Everything else" drive. The more safeguards, the better.

Sivran, thanks a lot for the link http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif I'll have to take a look at that program, see what I can do.

It's a good thing I have a bunch of data on another computer. No personal files unfortunately, but things like mods, a few shipset files, that kind of stuff.

[Atrocities]

Suicide Junkie said:
Oh, and before you get too far into the reinstallation process;

***Partition your Drive***

Never let windows sit on the same drive letter as your irreplacable stuff.



why?

[StarShadow]

'Recovery' cd's are evil, they generally don't recover anything, they 'restore' your system to 'like-new' condition (ie. they reformat your HD and re-install the OS, and to hell with whatever else you had installed). As SJ said, it's a good idea to have an OS partition, and an 'everything else' partition. I'm really not impressed in the least by OEM's who give you a 'recovery' cd instead of a proper OS cd, then again I build my systems myself, so that's not really an issue for me lol...

[Kevin Arisa]

Partitioning is usually the very first thing I ever do to a computer. Personally, I think all computers should be sold with the drives already partitioned, especially since the average user has no clue what it's all about. Three partitions: System, Apps, and Games at the very least. I never understood the logic of having the entire hard drive being one big "bucket" that everything is tossed into. Not only does partitioning protect against most cases of accidental formatting, it even increases the rate at which a computer finds it's files. Instead of searching through the previously mentioned bucket, it is looking through designated compartments. And if the System partition gets corrupted , then you can reformat that compartment without fear of harming anything else. It's a priceless setup that has saved me vast amounts of trouble in the past.

[Fyron]

Make sure to install TweakUI so you can move various system folders (my documents, desktop, possibly program files) off the Windows no fly zone and into the safe zone. Makes it even easier to get back up and running after Windoze reinstalls.


Atrocities said:
why?

Because Windoze needs semi-frequent reinstalls to fix it after it eats itself. Just part of regular system maintenance.

=0=

Even better is to create a disk clone of the Windows partition just after you install it and your base programs, if you have a few gigs on the other partition you want to devote to this. Don't buy any crappy Symantec products for this. Probably a better tool on that site Sivran linked (and some not so good ones, so make sure to do your testing before you get too far along).

=0=

Dunno that I'd want to have to juggle space between apps and games, personally. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

When I saw this title the first thing I thought was "AT", until I saw it was Renegade who created the thread http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

Of course, it's always a good idea to keep your most important stuff (and your personal stuff, and mods, shipsets etc.) on one or more backup CDs/DVDs. Updating these backups every once in a while will take some time, but you won't lose your data entirely the next time you have a..... situation like this.

[StarShadow]

Yes, what I'd suggest, if you have a DVD burner, is to make your system partition about 4 gigs (8 gigs if you use dual-layer), install your OS and preferred base programs, then image the partition to DVD. That way, you only need to restore the image to have a working system again.

[Fyron]

Writable optical media (and many factory pressed) are rather fickle, unfortunately. Great for short term, but dodgy in the long run. Good to make 2 copies of the really important stuff. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Atrocities]

Imperator Fyron said:
Make sure to install TweakUI so you can move various system folders (my documents, desktop, possibly program files) off the Windows no fly zone and into the safe zone. Makes it even easier to get back up and running after Windoze reinstalls.


Atrocities said:
why?

Because Windoze needs semi-frequent reinstalls to fix it after it eats itself. Just part of regular system maintenance.

=0=

Even better is to create a disk clone of the Windows partition just after you install it and your base programs, if you have a few gigs on the other partition you want to devote to this. Don't buy any crappy Symantec products for this. Probably a better tool on that site Sivran linked (and some not so good ones, so make sure to do your testing before you get too far along).

=0=

Dunno that I'd want to have to juggle space between apps and games, personally. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif



The problem is, most people, including myself, really don't know how to do any of this. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif So it never gets done.

[Thermodyne]

Imperator Fyron said:



OSes shouldn't be managing boot files willy-nilly during the normal shutdown process... The boot files don't need to change unless you change your hardware or kernel files, which certainly doesn't happen every time you are running the OS. That's just asking for trouble, and definitely a Windows flaw if true.

Note that he never said he was turning it off while shutting down, but rather while booting up. Killing the bootup early on isn't an issue, since all its doing is reading data and building up RAM files. Perhaps not good due to mild stress on the drive, but definitely not going to kill Windows at this point.




The reason that XP does this is so that it will restart after you make changes or add hardware. All Plug and Play OS’s need to overwrite the boot files at shut down. In the old days you had to write these files by hand. Sure it was more reliable, but it was beyond the abilities of most people. What he was doing is called bouncing the loader. If you happen to catch it at the wrong moment, you’ll end up with damaged files. If he had put a bootable floppy in the drive or a bootable OS like BartPC in the CD reader he would have gotten away with it in all likelihood.

[Thermodyne]

Renegade 13 said:
Of course I knew goddamn well formatting it would wipe the hard drive. As I mentioned, the XP restore disk I had did the formatting ON ITS OWN. I did not tell it to format. There was no menu to select "repair" from. Put the CD in the drive, boots automatically from the drive, starts the formatting automatically, no input from me involved. Nothing I could do once the "Recovery" disk was in...

Not worth recovering the data. As mentioned, it's personal stuff, pictures, shipsets, etc. Can't justify the expense to recover.

I know this was an issue of user error, but there is an aspect of poor design in this. Power failures don't exactly let XP do it's thing upon shutdown. Evidently, a power failure could [censored] things up as well, if what I did was sufficient to do it. It should be designed so the boot files aren't messed around with upon shutdown. I'm no expert (obviously) but it seems like there should be little need to, unless maybe there was a software change.

In this case "I can fix this" did fix it. It wrecked the data I had, but having a functioning computer with no data is better than a [censored] up computer that won't even boot! Sure, the problem was caused by me, but I'll be damned if I'll spend $60 per hour to get someone to fix it for me!

Live and learn. Backup data, have a real XP CD, not some bull**** "Recovery" CD that comes with the computer...



Hey, I don’t blame you for trying to fix it yourself; I actually respect that sort of mind set. I only fault you for blaming the OS for not being ID- ten-T proof. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

What brand of system is it? Sounds like a real crappy restore CD. I’ve done 100’s of restores on Compaq, Dell, and IBM and they all asked very clearly before doing anything destructive to the data.

You really do need an XP cd. You don’t need one with a key you already own a license. You just need the media so that you can do repairs. Now that you are up and running, take a look at the restore CD. It might have the files you need on it, and then you could burn a copy of the XP setup cd.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[Thermodyne]

Imperator Fyron said:


Because Windoze needs semi-frequent reinstalls to fix it after it eats itself. Just part of regular system maintenance.







I'll have to disagree with you on this one. The vast majority of XP systems never get reinstalled. The system I'm on now is using a three year old install, and still works fine. At work, 90+ percent of the workstations never get a new install during their 4 year life. We were never close to that with 98 or 2K. To be fair, 2K is probably just as good as XP, but didn’t benefit from the management tools that XP enjoys now.

Most reinstalls not related to hardware are done because of three things. Removing malware by formatting is the biggest cause. Installing unsigned drivers and software is the second. And user error is third.

[NullAshton]

Operating systems should be made to handle a bit of user error. Such as the reboot problems he had. If the file gets corrupted, then the operating system SHOULD be able to fix it itself.

[Thermodyne]

NullAshton said:
Operating systems should be made to handle a bit of user error. Such as the reboot problems he had. If the file gets corrupted, then the operating system SHOULD be able to fix it itself.



It can, but since it cant load because of the problem, you need to boot from the OS cd.

[Fyron]

"Installing unsigned drivers and software is the second."

"Signed" versus "unsigned" drivers means virtually nothing. Plenty of "signed" drivers are quite shoddy. They just ponied up the money for the signing... What is important is finding out if the company puts real effort into driver making, or if they just churn out crap that works most of the time.

"The reason that XP does this is so that it will restart after you make changes or add hardware. All Plug and Play OS’s need to overwrite the boot files at shut down... What he was doing is called bouncing the loader. If you happen to catch it at the wrong moment, you’ll end up with damaged files."

So not letting it boot up interferes with rewriting of boot files at shutdown time. Interesting proposition.

"I only fault you for blaming the OS for not being ID- ten-T proof."

I fault the OS for being set up to change boot files during booting, as you seem to be claiming it does. It makes no sense to change them at this time, especially if you didn't add any hardware, thus not creating a need for plug'n'play operations to kick in...

"The vast majority of XP systems never get reinstalled... The system I'm on now is using a three year old install, and still works fine."

The vast majority of XP systems are run by people that do not know how to take care of their PCs either way. I haven't witnessed XP to be any better at maintaining itself than 2k, both of which are only marginally better than 98...

There are certainly external tools you can get to keep Windows from eating itself, but they tend to cost money. Decent OS setup will let you get back up and running in under 20 minutes after the reinstall (or however long it takes you to restore your drive image if you go that route). I find it to be less effort overall, and much more effective, especially when maintaining the computers of people that like to install a lot of crap.

[StarShadow]

Out of curiousity, what OS do you run IF? I prefer win2k personally. Although, as you say, win98 is still certainly a viable OS(especially if you strip it down to around 30-50 megs or so lol)

[Renegade 13]

Thermodyne said:
Hey, I don’t blame you for trying to fix it yourself; I actually respect that sort of mind set. I only fault you for blaming the OS for not being ID- ten-T proof. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

What brand of system is it? Sounds like a real crappy restore CD. I’ve done 100’s of restores on Compaq, Dell, and IBM and they all asked very clearly before doing anything destructive to the data.

You really do need an XP cd. You don’t need one with a key you already own a license. You just need the media so that you can do repairs. Now that you are up and running, take a look at the restore CD. It might have the files you need on it, and then you could burn a copy of the XP setup cd.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif


The system was manufactured by Certified Data, the "recovery" CD came from them as well I assume.

I agree, it's not XP's fault that I messed with its comfortable routine. Mostly I was angry with the recovery CD for killing all my data http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif Though I do think that the OS should keep a backup of working boot files, just in case the usual set becomes corrupted or mutilated somehow. Then again, with a real XP CD, it wouldn't have mattered...just would have been a minor inconvenience.

I think I will take a look at the recovery CD, see if I can find the XP setup files I need, minus the crap http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Thermodyne]

The process is described as “optimizing the boot sector files” beyond the fact that it overwrites some of the files, I can’t tell you exactly what occurs. This area of the hard drive is not visible in windows, you’d have to use disk probe to see it. Frankly, I never needed to know more than that. It works or it doesn’t work. When it fails, there is a tool to repair it in the recovery console, “fixmbr”. That is as much as I ever needed to know about it.

If you really want to know how the file system works, read this:

Technet (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/c28621675.mspx#EQGAG)



As for needing third party tools, some people might benefit from them. Most of them are only applications that make use of tools already built into windows. I will agree that there are some third party apps that do things better than the windows tools, but as you said, they cost money. The three apps that I recommend are Antivirus of some kind. Symantec Corp ver is the best but is resource intensive. And you should stay away from their home use versions, too much crap built in. Many of the free AV apps work almost as well and use fewer resources. I use Symantec on my servers and AVG free on everything else. You also need an anti spyware/malware app. I can’t really recommend any one over the others. At work we have it built into the Antivirus, here at home I’m always running one of the MS beta’s. But I think using Firefox eliminates the vast majority of them. The third app I recommend is Ghost. Sure it costs money, but it’s easy to use and it’s reliable. Anyone can sit down; watch the tutorial, then create an image of their system. If you take the time to really learn how it works, you can even restore individual files from an image. I run DPM here at home, but I still use Ghost to back the DPM server up. I also keep a Ghost image of the base install for every box I have. If I need to do a demonstration of something for a customer, I can have a clean install ready in 10 minutes.

Your comment about signed drivers is somewhat dated and sounds like 2K experience. With XP, signed drivers are tested by MS and seldom cause problems. When Vista gets here, signed drivers will be the only ones that you can install from the GUI. Unsigned drivers will require cmd line switches to over ride the built in protection features.

For those of you who still have 9x games that you like to play, MS just dropped the price of Virtual Server to free. With VS you can host other OS’s virtually on your windows box, running them from a window more or less like an application. Down side is that it takes some serious hardware to do it well.

[Suicide Junkie]

Down side is that it takes some serious hardware to do it well.

Which is why my 166mhz, 48 meg, 2GB Lappy is awesome with 98 on it.

[Fyron]

"Your comment about signed drivers is somewhat dated and sounds like 2K experience. With XP, signed drivers are tested by MS and seldom cause problems."

I have never noticed any difference with signed/unsigned driver reliability in XP than in 2k, on any box I have worked on. Microsoft just tests to see that they function. They can't test every possible configuration and every possible case. I suppose if you always stick with the basic mass market stuff, you wouldn't encounter as many troubles...

Vista will not make the driver issues any better. It will just create even more hassles for the little guys. Unless, of course, Microsoft is going to provide testing and signing for virtually free...

"Out of curiousity, what OS do you run IF?"

I run 2k for gaming needs. 98 is good for older hardware, but it doesn't handle 200 GB drives and 1 GB ram and such very well. Can't be bothered with all the bloat and hassles of XP for no net gain.

[Thermodyne]

Suicide Junkie said:

Down side is that it takes some serious hardware to do it well.

Which is why my 166mhz, 48 meg, 2GB Lappy is awesome with 98 on it.



LOL Yep, I keep one of those too. Mines a 300MHz Celery with 64 megs.

[Renegade 13]

I have a bit of a problem that someone might be able to help me with. Yep, another problem http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I thought my hard drive wasn't partitioned. Well, turns out it was. Into one big chunk that is C: and encompasses most of the hard drive, then there's 8 MB that were unallocated. Anyways, I've managed to mess with the recovery CD and copied files onto a writable CD that will now allow me to install XP without the OEM files automatically choosing the options. So I can now, when installing the OS, choose to repair, create partitions, etc. Good so far. Well, I can't create the partitions that I want to, since the hard drive is already partitioned!

Is there a way to remove the partitioning so it's all unallocated space (doesn't matter if I lose data, all I have is the basic XP install right now)? Or even to just re-adjust the partitioning so the OS is on it's own partition, then everything else on another?

Thanks!

[Alneyan]

Actually, you probably don't have 8 MB left: what you have left is 0 MB, but 0 looks very much like 8 in the Windows XP install. I know I have the same figure, but cannot create any partition there, and 8 mb is either way too much or useless for other uses.

You can delete your partitions from the XP installer directly, or you can use another program elsewhere. You may get away with resizing your partition (the partition must be defragmented for that to work), making room to create new partitions; the XP installer does not support this feature however, so you will have to look elsewhere. It might also mess up with the way XP handles boot and the like, depending on how you go about it. I know XP can be annoying when setting up a multi-boot on a single harddrive.

[Renegade 13]

Alneyan said:
You can delete your partitions from the XP installer directly, or you can use another program elsewhere.


Hmmm...I tried to do exactly that from within the XP installer, but it said setup files were on that partition, so it couldn't delete the partition. But I have an idea...might work...

**runs off to try**

[Alneyan]

Odd. The only message to this effect I got was "Hey, it's system files, are you sure you want to blast the partition back to Vasuda Prime?". Are you sure you don't have an option to accept? Of course, the program will ask you a second time if you are sure about deleting all your files. The installer shouldn't mind those system files; if it did, it would have some serious trouble when installed on a "barren" harddrive.

If for one reason or another (the same problem as with the auto-format?) it doesn't work, format c: is a pretty powerful spell. Power Word: Kill, that sort of powerful. You might have to boot up a Win 98 boot disk or some such to cast the spell, though; if you don't have a floppy disk, you can also burn a CD that will act as a floppy boot disk (it worked well enough when I installed Win 98 and did some fdisk/format).

[douglas]

That 8 MB of unpartitioned space is actually where the information on what partitions you have and what parts of the disk they are on is stored. No, it almost certainly doesn't actually require the whole 8 MB to store that information, that's just the smallest section of hard drive space it can allocate, just like a program requesting one extra byte of RAM is probably going to get a 4 KB chunk (which further requests will use until it's all gone) instead. Keeping track of space in units much smaller than that would require too much extra space dedicated to keeping track of it than the extra precision is likely to be worth.

[Alneyan]

Isn't all this information supposed to be stored in the MBR? (Or the EMBR, as applicable, and similar records) I know that's where I would expect to find my bootloader link and partition tables stored. Of course, XP isn't very informative either way: this space is labelled as unpartitioned (implying it isn't used at present), but if it really was empty, it isn't terribly useful to show the space up.

On the other hand, if XP is using some other space for a similar purpose, that could explain the difficulties when using this particular OS in a multi-boot. In particular, XP loves to "convert" FAT32 partitions created with fdisk, requiring a reboot afterwards (FAT partitions created via the XP installer are fine), so this could be a consequence of this behaviour.

Do you have any link with more info about this behaviour? I suspect it is linked to XP, since I've never seen it pop up on other OS (my current partition table does not show any unallocated space, if I fill it up to the max).

[Renegade 13]

Hmmm...still won't let me delete the partition, and I also can't format C:. It says something like "Can't do it, are you sure you don't have any windows open that are displaying drive contents or information?" which I don't. Frustrating!

[Thermodyne]

Tell me how you got to where you are now. Did you build a bootable CD? Or did you run setup from windows?

To use the partition tools from the setup cd, you need to have booted from it. Otherwise, if you booted to windows on c:, the files are in use and it won't let you whack them.

Once your boot to the cd, select the partition, hit d then enter then L IIRC. It tells you what to hit as needed. Then select the unused space and hi c. It will ask you how much space to allocate. With all the apps that have to install at least part of their content to c: and patches and such, at least 10gigs, 20 would be better if you can afford the space. Put the rest in a second partition up to 50gigs or so. Any larger than that and you are really starting to waste space. Two 40's would be better than 1 80gig partition.

[Renegade 13]

I grabbed the Setup.exe file and the I386 folder from the recovery disk, then burned them to a writable CD. I then ran the setup.exe file and tried to reinstall windows via this method. However, this was when I ran into the problem of the windows intstaller not allowing me to delete the main partition. I also couldn't find a way to delete the partition through other methods.

It then hit me that the recovery disk formatted the drive before reinstalling windows. So, I started the reinstallation process using the recovery CD, allowed it to begin its formatting process then ejected that CD. It didn't like that too much, but then I inserted the burned disk with the setup information on it, and it allowed me to continue. The formatting process had completed and now is allowing me to delete the one huge partition and create the smaller ones I had desired in the first place. That's where I'm sitting right now.

I'm wondering what the ideal number of partitions and partition sizes would be, considering the fact that my hard drive is 189 GB, I have lots of games and other files (music, pictures, etc.) that should probably be put on a separate partition.

Once again, my heartfelt thanks to all who have helped me with my massive screwup. It has been invaluable. I think I'm finally getting to where I need to be.

[Thermodyne]

I’d go with 40 on c: (system) and then make three more of equal size. Two for files, music, and such and the last one to hold those images that you are going to make as backups from now on. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Seriously, when you get done, get Ghost or something else that does the same thing and make a restore image. You can create one that spans several cd’s if needed and keep it as a master. They have a shelf life of at least 2 years if stored in a cool dry place. For working backups, just write them to the last partition. Compress them as much as you can and keep at least two. That gives you two points to restore from just incase you end up backing up something that you would like to be rid of.

[Fyron]

Alneyan said:
Isn't all this information supposed to be stored in the MBR?

The MBR is in there, at least on the IDE0 master drive.

=0=

Why do you need 40 GB for Windows partition? Just move Program Files (and things like My Documents, Desktop, possibly even Start Menu) to a different partiton with TweakUI so you don't have to reinstall most apps when you reinstall Windows. Just change the pointers over and you're back in business.

[Thermodyne]

Any Apps that write to the registry during install will need to be reinstalled with the OS anyway. And most fully compliant windows apps will install some files to the system drive regardless of where you point the installer. I went with 40 because it's so hard to resize the system partition, and doing so puts your system at risk. He could go with 20 or even 10, but if he runs out later, it's a long process to increase that partition. He has space to burn, so why not 40?

Anyways, once we move him to using image files, his reinstall/reactivate day are done. If it hoses up, blow the image back onto it. 15min tops and you’re done.

[Fyron]

Most apps I use don't need to use the registry. The tiny number that do can just be reinstalled as needed. Using the registry for user level apps was a terrible invention anyways. Hopefully Vista does away with it and makes apps keep their own data (hopefully in a sensible manner using XML or so)...

The goal here is to separate the operating system from the user level apps as much as possible. *nix makes this easy with mount points. TweakUI can let you approximate it tolerably.

[Renegade 13]

Success!! Well, mostly. Windows has been reinstalled onto it's own partition, except oddly enough it chose the F: drive to do so http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/confused.gif That may be my fault, I created three partitions (40,50,50) with 50 GB left over, then accidently started the installation before creating that final partition (the one that would have been F:). I'm assuming Windows took all that unallocated space as it's own, so now it's sitting on a 50GB partition. Oh well, if I choose to it'll be simple enough to just redo it all over again, properly. Might do that if I decide I have an hour to burn tonight.

The important thing is that Windows is restored, will be properly partitioned soon, and I'll be smart enough in the future to actually back my stuff up!

[Thermodyne]

Windows will run equally well from any of the Partitions. Actually, we often boot public servers from drives other than c: just to keep the hackers at arms length. If you really want to mess with them, you can have a little c: drive complete with system files just to keep them busy if they get in. All the while the server is running merrily along off of another partition.

[Thermodyne]

Imperator Fyron said:
Most apps I use don't need to use the registry. The tiny number that do can just be reinstalled as needed. Using the registry for user level apps was a terrible invention anyways. Hopefully Vista does away with it and makes apps keep their own data (hopefully in a sensible manner using XML or so)...

The goal here is to separate the operating system from the user level apps as much as possible. *nix makes this easy with mount points. TweakUI can let you approximate it tolerably.



Last I heard, weren’t you a CS major?

I don’t have any idea what apps you use, but based on your statement, I have a good idea about what you don’t use.

With windows XP and to some extent 2K, the whole idea is to gain app performance by integrating applications into the OS. All of the major applications I work with daily use windows integration. Office 03 and XP both use it. Autodesk uses it. Micro station uses it. Adobe uses it. Roxio, Intuit, Adaptec, Cisco, Firefox, Plextor, Symantec, Peachtree just to name a few. I can’t recall seeing an app come out in the last couple of years that didn’t write to the registry. There is just too much to be gained from integration not to go wit it. I’d have to go back to something like Office 97 probably, before finding one without it. In the business world, if it installs locally these days, it’s integrated. Even some of the big web front-end’d db apps install clients to integrate themselves with windows.

Just out of curiosity, what apps do you run?

[Suicide Junkie]

Ah, the simple pleasures in life http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Will]

And you know, you can always just export all the registry keys that your programs put in, and then apply them should you need to wipe the OS partition.

And really, who needs the registry? As long as you got vi, pine, lynx, ssh, perl, gcc, and nethack, you're set.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Suicide Junkie]

Tsk Tsk. You left out wine and SE4.

[Thermodyne]

Will said:
And you know, you can always just export all the registry keys that your programs put in, and then apply them should you need to wipe the OS partition.

And really, who needs the registry? As long as you got vi, pine, lynx, ssh, perl, gcc, and nethack, you're set.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif



Ya....I'll just fireup the ole AS400 and start using vi..........NOT.. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Sick.gif

[Alneyan]

Thermodyne said:
Ya....I'll just fireup the ole AS400 and start using vi..........NOT.. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Sick.gif



Of course you won't. Emacs beats Vi any time of the week. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif *Ducks*

I wouldn't offend glibc by leaving out of the list, though. That monster of a library can get offended pretty quick, so you should always treat it with all due respect. I'm partial to apt myself. One command, and plenty of programs get reinstalled; configuration files are a little more annoying, though nothing to write home about.

[Suicide Junkie]

Pico forever.

The guys in the OS course thought I was crazy, but it works great. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Fyron]

Last I heard, weren’t you a CS major?

Computer engineering, but close enough.

With windows XP and to some extent 2K, the whole idea is to gain app performance by integrating applications into the OS.

Which is precisely why IE bugs are such a security problem... integration into the OS. But that's at a much deeper level, into the kernel itself, so bad totally from a technical standpoint rather than aesthetics. Sometimes, marginal performance gains should be sacrificed.

I can’t recall seeing an app come out in the last couple of years that didn’t write to the registry.

Apps that need to be installed to create registry keys and can't just be run after copying the installed folder over (or after wiping and reinstalling the OS) are highly annoying apps. Those are what I try to keep to a minimum. Apps should be robust enough to recreate required registry keys (or stored settings files, however they store their config data) if it is missing.

This is primarily what I was thinking of when I typed about apps I use not needing the registry, rather than not using it at all. I think I mistyped on that bit. A number of the apps I like do happen to keep all of their data locally instead of registry, however.

Just out of curiosity, what apps do you run?

Apps that keep their data locally:
Foobar2000
MPC (though it usually gets reinstalled with codec packs, since those are a pain to set up manually)
bblean
xplorer2
CKRename
Dscalar
Icecast
LAME
Oddcast (though now as a plugin of Foobar2000)
SlimServer
DosBox
Various classic games and emulators

Apps that use registry but are happy to rebuild themselves:
EditPlus (though contemplating migration to Notepad++)
Gaim
FileZilla
SE4
WinSCP
EAC
Spybot
Irfanview

Apps that I reinstall either way:
Kerio
AVG
Driver stuff
K-lite Video codec pack (plus MPC and Quicktime Alternative)
Nero
cygwin
Visual Studio 2003 (stay away from 2005!)
Various poorly written games that don't recover well

Apps that I have only used recently so don't know:
FolderShare
Skype
Psi
VirtualDub

I think that about covers it. Probably miscategorized some things, but meh.

[Renegade 13]

I have another massive problem I hope someone can help me with...it seems I have horrible luck recently.

OK, so here's the deal. I was playing a game tonight, when suddenly it crashed on me. Little dialogue popped up saying the usual "Do you want to report this to Microsoft?" thingy. I clicked "Don't Send" as I always do. Now comes the strange part. My computer then spontaneously rebooted. Only it won't boot up anymore. It gets to the stage where it says "Loading IDE Drives..." or "Detecting IDE Drives..." or something like that, and then it just hangs there. Nothing I can think of will snap it out of this. I need some serious help here if anyone can give it to me, this is not good at all. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif Computers hate me!

[Thermodyne]

It would seem that you have some additional problems. The system should not have rebooted from a game crashing. Lock up yes, blur screen yes, reboot no. The game is approved for xp, and not an old game that happens to run on it? It could also be related to your PSU problem, or it could be an issue with another part getting ready to die. Is it still under warrantee? If so you might want to pack it back to where you bought it and let them have a look. IIRC, that is the brand that London Drugs carries?

The system not being able to find the drives is not good. Seldom do the cd and hard drive roll over at the same moment. You might take a look and see if they have anything in common, like being on the same power lead, or the same ribbon cable. Check to make sure a jumper didn’t fall off. Then you might pull the power from the cd and see if it will boot. If not then plug is back in and unplug the hard drive, put a bootable disk in the cd and try to boot it again.

You can check the PSU with a VOM, just turn the system on and pin it out.

The last thing that comes to mind is, if the cd reader and the hard drive are on the same ribbon cable, and the board has two IDE controllers, switch it to the other controller.

That’s all I can think of at this time……

[Alneyan]

For what it's worth, I occasionally have lock-ups that force a hard reboot, but I cannot detect my CD/Harddrives or enter the Bios after these sorts of crash. I simply have to shut down the computer and restart it to go back to normal.

I'm not quite sure why it is so, though I have my own idea. One of these days, I guess I'll have to open up the case and try to take care of it... but I'm not really on speaking terms with the hardware part of a computer.

[Renegade 13]

Before anything else, a correction:

After I wrote my post last night, something changed. While I was writing, the screen changed to display this:

NVIDIA RAID IDE BIO 4.76
Copyright (C) 2004 NVIDIA Corp.

Detecting array...

I'm not sure if this is helpful or not.

Thermo: The game is XP approved, not an old game. Yep, Certified Data is the brand London Drugs carries, I was considering taking it to them (yup it's on warranty) and saying "fix it!". But that would mean being without it for quite some time, so I was leaving that as a last resort.

I'll try what you mentioned with the power leads and ribbon cables, though checking the jumpers isn't really an option until I do some research on them since I have little knowledge about them.

You mentioned I can check the PSU with a VOM...by VOM do you mean Voltage Meter?

Thanks for your help, I hope I can fix this problem...

[Renegade 13]

Good news! It seems I just have a temperamental computer...

I killed it via the power switch, left it for a moment, fired it back up and voila! it functions perfectly again. I'm at a loss to explain why any of this happened, but now that it's fixed I really don't care too much.

It is odd though that a reset would not fix the problem (I tried resetting once), but a full power-down would...

Once again I'm in your debt Thermodyne and Alneyan for the help you provided me. I'm just surprised this time it had such a simple solution...

[Thermodyne]

It sounds like the system has an onboard raid chip, and that it is turned on in the bios. IIRC, you are using only one hard drive. If so, you'll need to go to the bios setup and turn the onboard raid off.

VOM = Voltage - ohm meter, or mulitmeter.

[Renegade 13]

Easy enough to turn off. Thanks! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[Baron Munchausen]

Renegade 13 said:
Good news! It seems I just have a temperamental computer...

I killed it via the power switch, left it for a moment, fired it back up and voila! it functions perfectly again. I'm at a loss to explain why any of this happened, but now that it's fixed I really don't care too much.

It is odd though that a reset would not fix the problem (I tried resetting once), but a full power-down would...

Once again I'm in your debt Thermodyne and Alneyan for the help you provided me. I'm just surprised this time it had such a simple solution...



Remember that hardware manufacturers are pushing the limits in seach of performance. Given the speed at which things are developed, each new generation of hardware is really only 'nominally' reliable/stable until proven by months of use by the general public. Sometimes events unforseen by the manufacturers can cause various 'registers' in these very complex chip sets can get set to weird configurations that are not in the 'spec' and cause the system BIOS to get confused. Since the system is only able to cope with what the designers though of in advance, it can't fix itself. I've seen things like this myself. HDs and other peripherals can become unusable even though it doesn't make sense for the device to have been damaged by a mere software glitch. A hardware off instead of the 'reboot' switch fixes this, as you discovered.