The Whiney Thread

[Rachel]

Thread for bitching, whining, and hair-tugging.


Backing up all of my music and pictures is the most depressing and seemingly never-ending task. My hard drive is making a distressing buzzing noise.

[robot]

Still doing it? Good luck.


My cold is getting worse and work sucks.

[buttsie]

Thread for bitching, whining, and hair-tugging.


Backing up all of my music and pictures is the most depressing and seemingly never-ending task. My hard drive is making a distressing buzzing noise.

Its in the small print when you buy the PC
This product from bastards incorporated works on a ratio of
90% distress 10% fun you have been warned

I agree backingup is a bitch which is why i did it once and said never again

Record to date....5 meltdowns in 7 years...backups....nil...ho hum

[Extreme Allah]

Are you sure it's the hard drive? I used to work on-campus tech support as part of my scholarship, and 95% of people who thought their disc was at death's door just had a fan noise. Not to condescend; just making sure you checked.

[JenR]

i know how you feel. i can max out my comp in a week with my photos of my camera.

[Extreme Allah]

It could be the fan. idk. It just started a couple of weeks ago and sounds super loud and horrible. It only happens when I access the hard drive, so that makes me think that's what it is.

My hard drive has needed formatting BAD, though, so I hope it doesn't blow up or something in the process.

More bitching: I just filled up a 4 GB DVD with music and that's not even half of what I have.

Is this a desktop? Take the panel off and put your ear up to both. It should be fairly obvious, that way.

I've downloaded 10GB of music in a day, kid. 215GB is the tragic price of hipness.

You can get hard drive space really cheap, now. If you keep an eye on the deal forums, 500GB around $60 isn't uncommon.

[Snarl]

Backing up all of my music and pictures is the most depressing and seemingly never-ending task. My hard drive is making a distressing buzzing noise.

It is possible that the system files and your personal data (music, video, etc.) files got so much fragmented and mixed up, that Windows needs to move the hard drive's head all over the place to read the file-fragments together. That can cause an annoying noise and drastic system slowdowns. Of course, this is only possible if you use the same logical drive (C: ) to keep both Windows and your documents on it.

The solution would be splitting your hard drive's space into two (or more) partitions (=logical drives, if they're all primary partitions; an extended partition can hold multiple logical drives) so there would be C:, D:, E:, ... logical drives available on your hard disk to hold files. Windows would reside on drive C:, while your data could be moved to E:, for instance. This way your data would not mess up with vital system components. Moreover, in case of future system breakdowns, the backup would affect only the Windows files on drive C: and NONE of your personal stuff located on other logical drives.

It can be done with a partition manager program. This procedure is rather an expert's task... However, if you consider a clean sweep (i.e. formatting the entire hard disk and re-install Windows (XP?)), then you could give it a try. With no risk of data loss.

Steps:

0. Your Windows should already reside on an NTFS formatted volume, usually called C:

1. Install the partition manager program Paragon Partition Manager 2005
(Sorry, my harddisk was already dead by that time. At least, this is supposed to be free, it requires only registration through the internet, according to my old PC-magazine. If not, we're stuck.)

2. After backing up all your data, delete all the data stuff off your drive

3. Using the partition manager, you can resize drive C: to a size you think it will be enough to hold exclusively Windows and the program files without your data. I cannot help with that, only you know how big your system is with all the installed programs - and also your hard drive, in the matter of speaking. You should always take into account, let's say, +10 GB free space for future programs and for temporary files.

4. With the partition manager you can create a new partition (primary or extended - you should favor primary, it doesn't require further steps), allocating the newly freed area on your disk to a new logical drive (D:, E:, F:, etc... depending whether your CD/DVD drives own the actual letter already or not. I assume you have only 1 CD/DVD drive so I'll call the new logical drive on the hard disk E:. BTW, it is possible to change all the assigned letters except the system volume letter (C: in this case) but only via logged in as Administrator).

5. Format drive E: using NTFS filesystem, this is gonna hold your data

6. On your new, now usable drive E:, create this folder-structure:
E:\Winsettings\Rachel\ (or whatever your current username is, and inside it:
Application Data
Desktop
Documents
Favorites
(In fact, the names are irrelevant but it's better to have unambiguous relations.)

7. Use the Windows XP's symlink-feature to link the following folders on drive C: to the ones you just created on drive E:
C:\Documents and Settings\Rachel\Application Data -> E:\Winsettings\Rachel\Application Data
C:\Documents and Settings\Rachel\Desktop -> E:\Winsettings\Rachel\Desktop
C:\Documents and Settings\Rachel\Documents -> E:\Winsettings\Rachel\Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\Rachel\Favorites -> E:\Winsettings\Rachel\Favorites


If you did it right, from now on, your installed programs are going to search for data in those folders on drive E:.
Now, you can copy back your data files from the backup DVDs to drive E: in the corresponding folders.

I know, it's not for beginners... Consulting with Kazuya is highly recommended because I don't have Windows to do it myself to make things sure.

[maverick88]

Fuck Sony.

I know, Sony sucks, there are several tv shows that I like which Sony owns and it takes them forever to release them on dvd and when they do it's a long time before they release the next seasons.

[bsx]

I've got everything wiped and up and running now, but nothing will bring my bookmarks back. I'm currently mourning their loss and kicking myself for forgetting about them. All my recipes... tutorials... articles... window shopping...

Woe.

I know how that feels. Losing bookmarks you carefully selected/rearranged/organized for years, and now they're gone. Add to that the feeling that hits you about a nanosecond after you started the irreversible wiping of the hdd - "fuck, i forgot to backup the bookmarks".
After this happened to me a few times, i finally decided to put all my bookmarks on del.icio.us. There is a Firefox extension that will automagically sync your bookmarks with your del.icio.us profile.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615

On a side note: My hard disk luckily isn't as b0rken as i thought it was. No bad sectors, no head crashes. *phew* Just the electronics inside the drive acting up, preventing it occasionally from being recognized by the system during boot. I could still read all the data in the slowest operating mode.
Now i'm gonna do some really nasty stuff to it before i toss it.
Hard disk, prepare to be wiped with DoD 5220.22-M!

Oh, and: Full ack to "Fuck Sony".

[Dazza]

I recently got a 500GB external HD to backup my HD's and my dads. I then got Acronis True Image which can take an image of your HD so if it goes tits up you need to just get a new HD and then once recovered everything will be exactly as it was.

[Kazuya]

Thread for bitching, whining, and hair-tugging.

You are not alone. Yesterday, I found out that something is wrong with my laptop. Two days ago, I reinstalled Hitman Blood Money. I played that game on my laptop before and everything was fine. When I reinstalled it, everything was fine, I had no error messages or something like that. But when I wanted to start it, nothing seemed to happen. At first I thought, that maybe my Omegadriver was to blame, so I changed my graphics driver. Result: Nothing. I decided to say "Fuck it" and reinstalled Hitman Contracts. The same procedure. Installation fine, but double clicking the .exe had no effect. This made me quite nervous, because I definitely know, that I played Contracts before on the very same setup I am currently using. My aggressivity level rose to new hights. A while ago, I had installed the original UFO Enemy Unknown. It is still on my harddrive and I was able to run the game, without any problems. Unwilling to deal with the problem, I decided to install something older, that must run on my computer. A good substitute for Hitman is Manhunt. So it found its way back to my harddrive, I double click the exe. Guess what happened. Right, nothing. Since UFO still runs on my computer, I made a last attempt to find an old and dusty game with gore and unnessecary violence. My choice fell on Vice City. Well, of course I wasn't able to run it either. But contrary to the other games, I got an error message. Believe it or not: "Not enough graphics card memory available."
Okay, I started dxdiag. And there I found the unbelievable:
"Graphics memory: "
No, I did not forget to write the value. There is no value.
Furthermore the DirectX functions were not available and the buttons to activate them were grayed out.
So I went to the system setup, deinstalled my graphics driver completly, rebooted, installed the original driver, rebooted again and nothing had changed. dxdiag showed still the same. So I downloaded the newest ati catalyst driver for my graphics card and did the same procedure. When my computer finished booting, the first thing I did, or better the first thing I wanted to do, was to reset the desktop resolution. So right click on the ati symbol -> left click on setting -> blue screen and emergency shutdown of my laptop. In a last attempt to figure out what was wrong (before throwing my laptop out of the window), I had a closer look to my hardware settings. I found out some funny things: My graphics card has for some reason an IRQ of 16. And it shares this IRQ with one of my PCI-USB Standard Hostcontrollers. I don't know yet, if I erase my c drive and set up windumb completly new or if I try to rebend everything until it works.

I feel a little bit like the main character from the movie Sonnenallee, who wrote the following analogous words:

Dear diary, today I have learned a new letter in school. The "T" now I can write a word, that I think very often:
SHIT

[bsx]

In a last attempt to figure out what was wrong (before throwing my laptop out of the window), I had a closer look to my hardware settings. I found out some funny things: My graphics card has for some reason an IRQ of 16. And it shares this IRQ with one of my PCI-USB Standard Hostcontrollers.

Doesn't sound that strange to me. My graphics card and my Firewire (IEEE-1394) controller share IRQ 16 and get along just fine. You might be facing some strange BIOS setting or probably defective hardware.

Code: Select all

emperor ~ # lspci -v
...
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation [...] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
...
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
...
02:08.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 IEEE-1394b Link Layer Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
...
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 16
...


[vessel]

I hurt so much right now. My athritis is acting up something fierce. My whole body aches.

[Kazuya]

Doesn't sound that strange to me. My graphics card and my Firewire (IEEE-1394) controller share IRQ 16 and get along just fine. You might be facing some strange BIOS setting or probably defective hardware.

Maybe I should have mentioned, that this USB Controller uses USB 1.1 (can't upgrade that) and my graphics card is an onboard AGP. And the bluescreen tells me something about an IRQ conflict. With firewire, this wouldn't be a problem, because your firewire driver should be fast enough. However, my USB is way too slow. So, if my graphics card fires some interrupt requests, while one of my USB is handled, then happens the following:
IRQ 16 arrives:-> routine checks graphic driver and usb driver.
This means, that in the end, my graphics card causes to call over and over again my dead slow USB driver. So I wouldn't wonder, if I get somewhere a stack overflow or something.

Stack Overflow -> Hardware IRQ -> blue screen -> auto shutdown.
And this matches pretty much with what I get to see sometimes.

I think, that the IRQ vector of my graphics card used to be 11. And this vector is not in use by another device. But where the bloody fuck can I change the IRQ?

[maverick88]

There's a rumor that Will Smith wants to make a remake of The Karate Kid. How or why should I feel bad for the writer's when the best they can come up with is a remake of a movie that doesn't need to be remade.