W A R N I N G !


W A R N I N G !

This page is full of non-facts and bullsh!t, (just like the internet and especially forums and other blogs), please do not believe entirely without exercising your intellect. Any resemblance to real things in reality is purely coincidental. You are free to interpret/misinterpret the content however you like, most likely for entertainment, but in no case is the text written on this blog the absolute truth. The blog owner and Blogger are not responsible for any misunderstanding of ASCII characters as facts. *cough* As I was saying, you are free to interpret however you like. *cough*

Sunday, May 4, 2008

What a f'ed-up week(end)... plus a lesson to be learnt

My DIY DAC really gave me a whole lot of problem so much so that I really should've gotten a 2nd-hand Go-Vibe DAC or a premade DIY DAC or something. Paying more for the power cleaning circuit, better finish, CASING, SIZE, SOUND QUALITY (from the op-amp), and most importantly...

NO FUKKED UP PROBLEMS!!!!!!

...is definitely worth it.

It was thursday (Labour Day) morning after I finished building my Power-Booted USB Cable and I wanted to test it out. Fearing it might kill the amp, I tested it with my USB card reader cum hub. My com froze and it refused to load past the starting Windows screen ever again. Thinking it was some sort of file system corruption that XP is famous for, I tried the setup disc, and it hung at Setup is starting Windows. Fearing that the cable might have taken out the mainboard or worse, the harddisk with loads of my irrecoverable precious data, I immediately took out the HDD to test with the IDE/SATA-USB converter with my bro's laptop (and played a bit of The Typing of The Dead while at it). It works. So it might be the SATA controller that's dead. I tried the IDE HDD. It works. Backed up the data onto the backup HDD, tried formatting the HDD. Couldn't reformat due to some program monitoring the HDD. Tried Ultimate Boot CD. Cannot format NTFS. Tried with my bro's laptop. Program monitoring. Entered Computer Management -> Drive Management. Forced the format from there.

Lesson 1: You can force a format of a HDD through Drive Management
Lesson 2: If possible, keep the OS and data on seperate physicak HDDs. This also boosts performance.

I can't do that because I'm an SPCR forummer i.e. I like my PC silent.

It's all okay until after the install that I forgot I had forgotten to backup a file.

Lesson 3: Always backup the entire part of a partition/disk you're going to format

Usually I do that. But this time I'm really, really short of HDD space.

So I spent the next day or more trying to get back that file. No I won't be able to get it again off the internet, because it's a song that I wrote. And by song, I don't mean just the text file, but the midi script. Which takes a long time to make.

In the end, I gave up and proceeded with another reformat. Why? Because I have installed too many unformat softwares, plus I was afraid that I might have gotten a virus from a possibly infected ATi Southbridge Driver setup file.

Lesson 4: Always scan suspicious files

Right after the 2nd reinstall I decided to try my luck with the Power-Boosted USB Cable again, because it worked with the USB DAC. But this time, with the USB hub cum card reader. And guess what, it froze the com again. Same thing as last time. Except this time I also couldn't setup the IDE HDD.

Now I'm totally stranded; without a HDD I could work with and now without my bro's laptop, I have to live for a week before my brother probably comes back with his laptop. Luckily, my pop had installed a KVM set-up with another computer (my trusty old Pentium II 350Mhz) and I could use it to search the internet for solutions to this problem of setup hanging at "Setup is starting Windows".

And this, was after I tried many many many many ways to play with the file system using the Ultimate Boot CD.

Apparently the usual cause for this is Setup being unable to identify a hardware. So I tried by disconnecting the USB hub cum card reader. Didn't work. Removed the IDE/SATA-USB adaptor too and viola!

And I'm guessing that Windows and Setup (and BartPE) hung because of these two devices. (Windows can work with the IDE/SATA-USB adaptor so it was the USB hub cum card reader that hung it)

Lesson 5: A bad hardware (or ACPI or BIOS setting) can hang your com and make it impossible to load or setup

Good lord, I reformatted my com, lost a piece of my music, and wasted 3 whole days, over a stupid USB DAC, a Power-Boosted USB Cable, and because I didn't bother to to a skeletal boot!?

This is so fucking dumb...

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