Firehed’s Blog

About freakin’ time!  Once I managed to get a Win98SE boot disk creator and then copy my MS-DOS ghost.exe onto a separate floppy (yeah, even my 16MB USB key is infinately more useful than floppies), problems went away.  Having CD drivers helps things a lot.  Apparently my “damaged” CDs were fine, too.  I now have a portable, bootable hard drive image so my restorations should be a snap.  I’d suggest everyone else do the same after a fresh formatting and getting your smaller apps installed (everything but games, pretty much).  Keeping the installers around on a CD-R or a USB key would be a wise idea as well - now that I have one of decent size, it’s actually useful.  If you’ve got one of the Corsair Flash Voyager drives, install the partitoning software off the CD it came with and set yourself up a password-protected one (I used about 1/4 of it for this), and keep a backup of anything important on there.  While it won’t help if it’s just a backup if it’s stolen or gets destroyed, it should save you if you manage to do something stupid like accidentally reformat the main partiton.  Obviously, keep the necessary software on the main partition as well, so you can actually access the secure portion on the go (like on a public or friend’s computer)

Well, my headaches for the day are dealt with.  About time, too, as it’s almost 5AM.  Well, not quite, as I still can’t get that “processor” perfmon to show up, but at least I’ll be smart enough to just spend five minutes copying my Steam install off the other hard drive instead of five hours redownloading it.

Last suggestion for the day is to keep in touch with your zen, or something to that effect.  I got a fern for Christmas, and having something natural in a room with three computers running 24/7 is just somewhat relaxing.  Unless you neglect to water it.  I suppose a dinosaur plant from ThinkGeek would suit me better.

Ok, real last suggestion for the day is for anyone with an SMP system of sorts (dual-core or dual-proc or the quite pricy dual-dual-core setup) is to download ImageCFG.  For those finnicky apps that just only like having one proc available to them, this makes it so you don’t have to set the affinity every single time you load it.  Goes great with the aforementioned Steam (set the main steam.exe and not the individual games), or the latest Thunderbird 1.5, which likes to time out checking mail the first time if you’re dualling it (helps Firefox a bit too; it seems to scroll a bit smoother and animated gifs don’t do stranger things than be on the page in the first place).

Looks like Ghost is just as painful as the reinstall, if not more. It originally was telling me that the job would require about 37 CDs. Yeah right. After about eight, I realized the thing probably wouldn’t work anyway and didn’t waste any more. I managed to tweak it so it wouldn’t write the 35GB of free space on the drive to the disk as well, and it only took three. Looks like the CDs came preformed with some label-side damage, but it doesn’t matter because the bootable floppy I need to use for this doesn’t have working CD-ROM drivers. So while Ghost has integrated writing functionality, it can’t actually read the images back off the disks, nor can it check them. Lovely. I guess that’s what to expect when you use 15c CDs and an OEM copy off an old motherboard driver disc. Maybe the damage wasn’t severe enough to matter (it didn’t give write errors, anyways), but that hardly matters right now. As usual, trying to do anything with the windows copy was even worse than before. Maybe I just need to make a new bootable disk… I’m not sure whether my attempt at a bootable USB key is going to do it.

But after exchanging our new microwave, twice, (first two were damaged!) it’s installed. The thing has a damned appointment scheduler in it! Well, in any case, the included metal racks are apparently designed in a way so the thing won’t explode, and I’m now within the last 15 years of microwave tech by it having a turntable. I can go by the box for TV dinners now, and if I had any popcorn to try out, I’d go for it (though, working at a video store where we give it out for free on weekends, I can’t keep my sanity and eat too much of the stuff anymore).

Oh yeah, I got accepted into Clarkson, as well :) Babson remains my first choice, but the former has a pretty good business program as well (but the location couldn’t be worse if they tried).

Well, as I’m doing it now, I thought I’d make a list, for reference. Install this stuff before you make that new drive image. Defragging beforehand and deleting any excess installation files (C:NVIDIA or C:ATI, for example) would be a good idea as well. Well, softare and tweaks and whatnot. A general to-do after you get done waiting for that stupid installer screen to go away.

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• OpenOffice.org
• Diskeeper Pro
• Microsoft Image Resizer Powertoy (awesome if you ever post pics online)
• Ultramon (if you have multiple displays)
• All drivers and related hardware-specific software (duh)
• Media player of your preference
• Any Service Packs and/or OS updates
• WinDirStat
• CD/DVD Writing software (I suggest Nero6)
• Any system tweaks you like (As a 2GB club member, I prefer no pagefile)

I’d also suggest that if you’ve got a USB key of decent size (512MB+), keep an installation of PortableFirefox on there. Use that to grab all of your drivers and free downloads, and save them right to the key. You keep your to-be-imaged hard drive cleaner, and you have the files you need right with you everywhere. I’ve got a 1GB key, and I’m keeping installers for just about everything I just listed on there. Just about all of my drivers (save the sound card, because something huge is on the disc and I don’t want to take the time to figure out what I actually need off of it)

You may also want to make a restore point using the System Restore tool, “just in case”.

And, of course if you are making a Ghost backup of this, have a few black CD-Rs onhand, and for the love of God, don’t use the Windows-based version.

Watch those hands fly… yeah, my last couple of days have been filled with joy. I had it all set up perfectly too - those requisite programs installed, drivers taken care of, settings more or less to my liking. Went to make a Ghost of it so it’s not such a pain in the ass to do again, and I ruined it. Yeah, somehow it decided that it didn’t want to find the boot sector anymore. Unfortunately, the reapir doesn’t fix that, and trying to just overwrite your existing install without another quick format just makes things worse. The good news is that I can take care of all the drivers and programs in under fifteen minutes now, thanks to my new 1GB USB key (and knowing what requires a reboot and when, so I can “optimize” the order).

I think I’m on the fifth windows install screen right now, but oh well. It should be the last time ever for this system, as I’ve got a different version of Ghost (floppy bootable, though my hatred for the windows version of ghost far outweighs my hatred of floppies) to use. Once the DRM hell that will be Vista is released I guess I’ll get to do it all over again, but I suppose some pain now is worth not dealing with it ever again. I was going to try and insert some stupid metaphor about it here, but it just sounds retarded so I’ll hold off and spare you all the trouble of reading it.

Hey, at least it’s not like back when I had a SATA drive on my NF7-S where I needed the floppy to install the SI3112 drivers each and every time. Oh that brings back bad memories.

The delights of working at a video store are many, but public exposure to stupidity certainly isn’t one of them. Do you think that my hand is being held out for something other than the movie’s tag or your money? Oh no, I just want to shake your hand - leave the tag on the counter instead, thank you very much. Is the purpose of stomping your feet to remove snow from them? If so, do it outside, because after you’ve tracked the snow in, stomping it off your shoes rather defeats the point. It makes it worse, if anything, because then all the water is in one place rather than dispersed once it melts. Bringing the movie back to the wrong store, or the case without the disc is a nice touch too. Luckily I haven’t yet dealt with returning an empty case to the wrong store, but I know that now I’ve said it, it’s happening the next time I’m working.

Oh yeah, and it’s a freakin’ blizzard outside right now. While the car warming up for twenty minutes helped things a lot, the rear defroster automatically turning off after ten minutes really doesn’t. On a happier note, we finally bought a new microwave. Took long enough, the 20-year-old one that came with the house is downright worthless. I mean, duct-taping up one of those tiny $60 bargin things would have been a big improvement (we’ve got one of those over-the-stove things) - at least it would have had a turntable. That has been a standard feature for about a decade, now, right?
And FFS, if you’re going to still rent tapes (I mean, it is the year 2006, haven’t they been dead for at least five years?), at least rewind the damn things.
A week of school vacation started yesterday too. About time, I’m sick of dealing with an inept stats teacher (if I can maintain a 100% average in AP Calc for two quarters, you think I’d be doing better than a B- in stats). He was kind enough to assign a pop-take-home-test for the break. And my grad challenge paper is due the day I get back as well, so I get to interview at least three people and find some books - and “read” them - on opening an online business (yeah, because there are books on that), and write an eight-page paper. So basically it’s a school week without driving in. At least I should be getting a double-paycheck this week since I had the delight of covering for someone for a few days. Although knowing me, most of it’s going directly to Newegg. Oh well - my fileserver is now a bit quieter and not in the middle of the room, thanks to them, as my 25ft Cat6 cable and quieter HSF came in. I’m tempted to run the thing passively, but 65c is a bit toasty for my tastes, even if it is “safe”. But I’ll probably end up going for the screw it approach - when I’m working on the main rig I can’t really hear it, but it’s pretty noticible when I’m trying to sleep (just due to where it’s located).

I need to print off some DVD covers too. Yay, we all know how cheap ink is. Maybe it’s about time I just bring in a machine to burn make quasi-legitimate backups of movies so I don’t even need to take them home.

Apple just sold their billionth iTune (if you will), ~12:38AM EST today. I thought I’d break in my account by purchasing and hoping for the win… I was downloading stuff as it hit the magical tenth digit, so there’s that freak chance. I’ve been quite reluctant due to the DRM and lossy formats, but I figure if I win a 20″ iMac, a ten pack of iPods and a $10,000 iTMS card, I’ve made out fairly well (especially seeing that I’d probably eBay the card). In any case I just found a CD on there that I’d meant to pick up, so yay.
If I did win somehow, I’d suggest becoming a friend of mine, and you might get a brand new 60GB 5G out of the deal. To whoever won, congrats, and if it was me, w00t.

Well, the cold is almost over with. One bug out of my way, more or less anyways. It’s nice being able to almost breathe again. Unfortunately within the last couple of days, my software mangling got really impressive. While I’ve been meaning to reformat for a long while and use my other raptor as a second boot drive, I really don’t want to deal with backing up twenty gigs of probably useless data. However I finally got some new DVD cases in (200 of them, and at about 13c each, I made out pretty well). How my temp directory got over 800MB on a drive I haven’t booted off of in at least a year is well beyond me, though, as is why I have a copy of OSX Tiger .dmg (Apple’s ISO, if my understanding is correct) files on a windows hard drive and probably not an Apple computer within a mile of me. I would like an iBook, but seeing that it comes with Tiger, I think I’m set.

For anyone else looking to do some system cleanup, WinDirStat is a very, very useful Open Source app to let you figure out what’s eating at your hard drive. My old dFolder Explorer extension is getting a bit dated. And apparently you can delete stuff from within it as well, which makes cleanup that much easier. Eliminating that second copy of Steam eating a quarter of your 36GB Raptor helps quite a bit.

Oh yeah, I went a bit nuts adding some of those fun little buttons over the right, as you can see (unless you’re viewing from something like Netscape 0.001A1 from about 1982 which doesn’t support pictures…) Go ahead, steal some.

New goodies in from Newegg again, too. With luck, I’ll finally be able to move my media server out of the middle of my bedroom thanks to a Cat6 cable over 10 feet long. New 1GB flash drive too, now packing some Portable Apps. Do download them - they’re nice to have around for when you’ve gotta deal with that IE-only school computer or what have you. No joy getting SMTP configured correctly right in Portable Thunderbird yet, but I only really need to check my mail on-the-go at the moment, and there’s always the server-side SquirrelMail if I’m desperate. If you don’t have a flash drive, get one - I picked up the very speedy and durable Corsair units, and for $51 before a $15 mail-in-rebate, it’s a steal to begin with. I’d have rather liked the 2GB one I saw for $75 or so (Sandisk, I think), but it was out of stock and I don’t need that much space to go in my pocket anyways. My 16MB Gateway drive that I got for a mere $25 still holds a dozen floppies worth of data, and if I could be bothered to carry an iPod USB cable around with me everywhere, it’d be almost as nice as a solar-powered external drive (assuming that e.SATA ports end up becoming a front-mount option eventually).

Whatever, more busy work to deal with. Tonight’s HHB homework is to read about eighty pages and a three-page-or-so essay on material that nobody in the class understands. Yay.

And go figure, my calendar plugin thing broke XHTML1.0 compliance.  Oh noes!  Troubleshootins’ for another day, I suppose.  Or just use a watch.

Ah yes, I do wish I could remember what setting I changed that let my lovely X2 3800+ run at 2.55GHz no problem. Now it doesn’t like going over 2.38 or so. Unfortunately my BIOS dumped on me a while back,and there was one voltage setting that it seemed to like, or maybe it was memory timings or voltage or something stupid like that. Tack that onto software randomly saying that it’s expired and my keyboard’s media keys making my computer go into a “soft freeze” and I’m thrilled with the state of technology. Not to mention the latest iPod firmware breaks videos from playing properly (not that I watch too often, but for those times…), but at least my FFVII skin for it is half-decent.

Oh yeah, and I caught a cold. Goes nicely with ultra dry overheated classrooms and all that busy work.

But enough complaining, the highly nifty Speedfan saved me a $300-or-so bill the other day after one of my pumps failed. Well, it didn’t fail, it just had a loose wire, but it wasn’t running and the computer was, and it’s not a good combination. In fact I don’t even know if Speedfan helped, but the system shut down safely and I avoided boiling the plastic off the waterblock and a toasted chip. Maybe I’ll replumb my loop again; I’m not liking the dual aquajets as much as I first did and the second one is making the pump intake a lot more restrictive than it should be. And I’ve finally got a quiet heatsink on the way for my media server - maybe I’ll be able to get some sleep for a change.

Yeah, don’t we all know it.  Random, trivial and pointless tasks assigned for the sole purpose of wasting some sand in the hourglass.  And it kills trees.  What’s not to love?  Luckily I now have my own digital paradise to gripe about it :)