What makes you happy ?

And today’s problem is speakers. R speaker is quiet. Realtek drivers are up to date. All the sound properties are good, realtek sound manager is good and the auto test has a quiet r speaker. Nvidia driver (which I think is the culprit because that is all that changed) is v7.8.0.1. Plugged into the Zen all works well. I can’t see anything in the Bios menus that would affect balance/volume. Oddly, uninstalling the Realtek AC’97 Audio drivers didn’t actually do that. Headphones – which plug into the affected speaker (they are Logitech ones) – work fine.
So it’s only when the computer directly outputs to that speaker that the volume drops to almost nothing. But the speaker is okay. And the headphone link is okay. It’s very odd.

Edit:
Front jack produces the same result as the back one.

.. and I have no idea why. Steve suggested the sata driver floppy and while enabling the legacy USB which was the only change I made, I saw the drives as being recognised. So I’m installed and running. Very very odd. I’m happy of course.

Went to install Neverwinter Nights 2 and Jade Empire. I didn’t exactly read the boxes… my system should just run NWN2 but Jade might be tougher. So I could upgrade but I figure I’ll wait a bit. The desire to get my fingers in the machine’s innards is pretty low right now. And waiting will always see prices drop, though it’s probably not that much anyway.

We had Sky installed earlier – concession to the girls – and the guy doing it got chatting about his overclocked machine, the gfx card he had, ram etc. I said – as I have many times – that pc developers are lazy in that they will have hardware created for them, they use all available memory and then some more, that they force upgrades. I indicated the consoles by the TV and said that at least with them everyone knew what they were getting. His reply – “Yes, but consoles only have the gameplay”.

Installed XP into a partition. Created 2 more partitions on the same drive.
All looked good.
Powered down. Changed USB card, cleaned inside
Powered up.
And the main drive – the boot drive – has gone. Completely gone.

XP boots. I see the Owner logon. Click Ok. Full blue screen. Then the Windows login music, then the logout music then it gets back to the Owner logon.

If I get in using recovery I see the C: drive – which is the second drive. I can’t move out of that HD.
The BIOS sees two drives.

Open machine up. There are 2 HD’s. Of the cables going in/out there are a set identical but for 1 orange cable. Master? Switch and power up. Nothing, same as above happens.

I can’t reinstall Windows onto the second drive – the only one it sees – as that is my archive drive – and even if I could where did the first one go?

I have no idea where Windows thinks it has gone or how to convince it that it has returned.

Edit: Windows loads to a point then stops. So it must be loading that from the original HD. It then uses that information and part of that must be that the drive it looks at does not exist. So that’s a registry error? But how to get there?
The one drive it seems is not both as 1 large drive. There is no /windows folder.
The only option I have – so far – is to install into the HD it does see. Then boot from that and fix things later. And that risks data loss which isn’t crucial but would be annoying. Still, time for work…

Edit2: The main HD is the bottom one. I remove the connector (has 4 coloured wires going into it) from the top drive. Use a system rescue cd and it sees that disc. It sees the partitions I created. I tell it to make the * partition to a Primary. It says to reboot, I do. And still Windows (booting from the XP CD) says there is no HD. But there is.

Edit3: The BIOS sees no drives. The IDE Config screen has:
OnBoard SATA Controller: Auto
SATA Operation Mode: RAID
OnBoard SATAII Controller: Auto
SATAII Operation Mode: SATA
SATAII Driving: Normal
The CD and DVD drives are listed. Nothing else is detected.
Cables are all good, nothing undo, nothing lose.
I’m running out of variables here……..

Edit4: It’s dead. Nothing I do, nothing default values do and no amount of cable checking gets any life to either drive.

So……. proper recovery time. Go buy an external SATA case, plug in the drive with the archived material on. Then further think about what I can do next.

Edit5:
Systemrescue CD sees both drives. It has made the first partition a primary which I wanted.
ctrl-a enters the RAID setup. It lists both drives correctly.
The Setup menus from pressing F2 show NO drives. No matter what, no drives.
So it’s not a Windows error.
I have removed closed pins 2-3 on the jumpers next to the cmos battery. That reset the internal clock so it worked.
So why doesn’t it work?
(This is not frustration now, hasn’t been for a while. It’s a puzzle. A damn hard one too)

Edit6: (at 2am)
It’s not jumpers.
I removed the USB card.
I checked seating of everything, I’ve googled error 0075 and nothing applies. And it doesn’t apply because all was good. And it doesn’t apply because the cd can see them.

How about I post photos and someone take a look? :)

New XP install
Sata drives
It wants the drivers off a floppy
I have no floppy
The only machine that can write floppies is this one
So it doesn’t see the drives. At all.
So right now I haven’t a clue what to do.

It’s stupid that Windows cannot deal, and it’s stupid I can’t just yank something from the motherboard.

……… Enable sata, Disable raid.

Today is still not my day. If I could I’d go back to bed.

For reasons that escape me I am securely wiping my PC’s HD.
I went to reinstall XP (over a year in situ and I’ll be doing OS X next – less than a year…) and figured that rather than just let it overwrite, I’d get everything smooth and clean. I could have formatted but that doesn’t really do the job, it just plays a system trick – after all, that’s how the police et al get their info isn’t it? So I got dban – I’ve mentioned this before because it has the funniest FAQ entry:

Q: Why does my computer start into a black screen after using DBAN?

A: You must reinstall an operating system because DBAN removes it.

and I started running it. Right now it says:
Runtime: 04:18:30
Remaining: 31:11:39
It’s done 12.52% of 250gb.

I’m not complaining at all – it’s doing thorough job – but I do wish I’d looked into the speed. I bought Jade Empire today and was hoping to start playing it.

I was going to reinstall XP today having assembled what I believe are all the parts – key, drivers (missing the AMD64 one right now but haven’t really looked for that yet), backed up files but I thought a day or two delay would be good. I just know that as soon as I agree to the reinstall that I will have that lightbulb moment and recall something I should have kept. So slow could be good.
I recommend running the Belarc Advisor first too.

And once that’s done it’s games. music and images only.

As for why install, I want to tune it up from a fresh start. Use one of BV’s guides and go to a minimal setting for services. I could install Ubuntu – but as games don’t run as well and as the image management I want is not there – I won’t.

I’ve tried a few times to get the Macs named on the network. On a Windows machine it’s easy – name it. On the Macs? No way.
The Sharing name, even when most items are shared still has Unknown showing in the router.
Going to some DHCP setting and naming shows the same Unknown.
Rebooting the router / machine gets the same thing.
Removing a machine from the network then rebooting the router has no effect.
Searching the Apple forums shows nothing but the above.

So in the end I did it manually. Not a big deal but the Macs should have been able to broadcast their names shouldn’t they?

Anyway, bar 3 there’s a theme :)

Edit: The network is called Amanda

For whatever reason you care to use / not use, I for one find using a mouse on a Windows machine to be smoother and just plain better.

Let me use an analogy: There are certain driving games that feel just right – it feels like there is traction, that the response is correct, that the time between action and response is perfect. Gran Turismo / Colin McRae / Mario Kart64 for example. And there are some which just don’t pull it off – Double Dash for example. You can’t quite quantify what is wrong but the experience feels wrong.
That’s how I feel with the Mac mouse control – and I’m using the Logitech MX Revo on both.

And this is not an anti-mac thing, it’s just an observation :)