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I just checked the email account that I use for stuff like Facebook. Most of the mail in the inbox is from Facebook kindly letting me know that I'm missing bunches of notifications and updates because I haven't logged in for awhile. The only computer I ever log into FB from is the one that took a turn for the worst. It's the only one I had that logging into Facebook didn't make the machine slower than molasses. I wonder if anyone on Facebook has actually noticed that I haven't logged into it in three weeks.
Computer is still not well...
Jun. 26th, 2014 03:02 pmAs mentioned in earlier entries I've been having computer issues. The computer I use for everyday stuff is not doing all that well. The bad capacitors on the motherboard have been replaced. That took care of some of the problems but there's still something very wrong. The graphics adapter is behaving strangely, the FPU fails most of the tests I throw at it, and both Windows and Linux are showing all kinds of interesting errors. This could indicate that the FPU portion of the processor has somehow gone bad on me. It could also be the graphics adapter. Right now I'm leaning towards the VGA card being the culprit.
I ran memtest on it for a couple days and after a hundred passes not a single error came up. This leaves me fairly certain that whatever is wrong it's not the RAM.
Today I've finally gotten the hard drive out of it and into a new machine that was put together this past weekend. Yeah, I finally put something in that case that's been sitting on my livingroom floor for the past five years. It was amazing how much dust had collected inside of it. I've finished copying my files over to its system drive and there's a good that I need to sort through. I've run a few disk testing programs on the old hard drive and it's free of errors thus far. I think I can rule out hard disk failure as a culprit.
I ran memtest on it for a couple days and after a hundred passes not a single error came up. This leaves me fairly certain that whatever is wrong it's not the RAM.
Today I've finally gotten the hard drive out of it and into a new machine that was put together this past weekend. Yeah, I finally put something in that case that's been sitting on my livingroom floor for the past five years. It was amazing how much dust had collected inside of it. I've finished copying my files over to its system drive and there's a good that I need to sort through. I've run a few disk testing programs on the old hard drive and it's free of errors thus far. I think I can rule out hard disk failure as a culprit.
My main computer is down...
Jun. 17th, 2014 12:20 amThe computer I use for just about everything is currently nonfunctional. A capacitor on the motherboard is blown. Until something can be done about replacing the cap the machine is unusable. Unfortunately for me I have no way to access that hard disk which means the project I'd planned to work on this week will be delayed. That was the only functional desktop I had that can handle SATA drives. The other fast machine in the house with SATA needs every cap on its motherboard replaced. Actually everything I'd planned to do this week will be delayed. There are an embarrassing number of files I'm now wishing I had copied to a thumb drive.
This is the trouble with working with older machines. Every motherboard failure I've ever had was due to bad caps. On the positive side they can usually be replaced.
This is the trouble with working with older machines. Every motherboard failure I've ever had was due to bad caps. On the positive side they can usually be replaced.
Not much to say this week
Apr. 2nd, 2010 05:00 pmThere isn't much to say this week. I've been working on a couple projects this week. I've got the NSLU2 back up and going. Reminds me I need to remember to turn it off when it's not being used. The drive cage needs a new fan and it might not be a bad idea to replace the drive itself. For now it seems to be working fine. The fsck turned up some bad inodes and the damage makes me suspect it had more to do with the power outages it suffered before I got new batteries for the UPS. Still the drive is 4 years old and has been operating in a cage with a bad fan for a year or so. It's time to start budgeting to replace that hard disk.
Don't you just love harddisk crashes and mystery plumbing leaks? If it's not one thing it's another.
Aren't they lovely?
Mar. 23rd, 2009 07:44 pmThis is what 40 lbs of batteries look like:
Anyrate, everything seems to be working beautifully. Had a power outage this morning and the computer didn't even hiccup. No more living in fear and dread!
Anyrate, everything seems to be working beautifully. Had a power outage this morning and the computer didn't even hiccup. No more living in fear and dread!
Batteries are here
Mar. 21st, 2009 06:48 pmThe new batteries are here and have been installed. If anyone is interested in aging what a 15 year-old, heavily used UPS battery looks like I'll post pictures. Let me know. That's the one that the ravages of age are bad enough to really show up in pictures. The other two were just bulging badly and I don't have the lighting equipment to set up a shot that'll highlight that. The battery from the primary unit was bulging so badly it was difficult to squeeze it out of the case,
Now begins the process of determining if they all work properly. Fun times ahead.
Now begins the process of determining if they all work properly. Fun times ahead.
(no subject)
Mar. 13th, 2009 05:37 pmIt's that time of year again. The air feels strangely damp and the temperatures from the beginning of the week vary from very warm to kind of chilly. One is never sure whether to flip the switch between the air conditioner and heater settings or to just suffer it out for the conditions to change. Though for me, I favor to air conditioner for getting some of the humidity out of the air.
The batteries for the UPS still haven't arrived. The power glitches weren't as bad this week as they were the previous week where some days the electricity seemed to go out for a few seconds every hour. I still don't trust running a computer without battery backup. I've lost more data to power outages and glitches this year than I have since 1994 or so when I got my first UPS. Fortunately I have my Compaq notebook for writing.
In my last post I asked for some reading recommendations and all I got were recommendations for Briggs and Hamilton books and maybe a sidewise recommendation for the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. Might be time I finally read some of those. Never have. Might be fun and lately I've been wanting to get into some stuff in the contemporary and urban fantasy vein. At the recommendation of an old acquaintance I recently read A Kiss of Shadows and while interesting I'm not sure I'd want to read the later books.
This week I've done a lot of stuff on the private wiki. I've been using it to gather my notes and thoughts for that game setting I've been building for the last decade and more with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
auld_hippie. As of last night I'm up to 120 articles. Not counting category pages, images, and the talk and user subpages I've been using for notes on the notes, so the speak.
Well, that's enough for now. Be well, folks.
The batteries for the UPS still haven't arrived. The power glitches weren't as bad this week as they were the previous week where some days the electricity seemed to go out for a few seconds every hour. I still don't trust running a computer without battery backup. I've lost more data to power outages and glitches this year than I have since 1994 or so when I got my first UPS. Fortunately I have my Compaq notebook for writing.
In my last post I asked for some reading recommendations and all I got were recommendations for Briggs and Hamilton books and maybe a sidewise recommendation for the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. Might be time I finally read some of those. Never have. Might be fun and lately I've been wanting to get into some stuff in the contemporary and urban fantasy vein. At the recommendation of an old acquaintance I recently read A Kiss of Shadows and while interesting I'm not sure I'd want to read the later books.
This week I've done a lot of stuff on the private wiki. I've been using it to gather my notes and thoughts for that game setting I've been building for the last decade and more with
auld_hippie. As of last night I'm up to 120 articles. Not counting category pages, images, and the talk and user subpages I've been using for notes on the notes, so the speak. Well, that's enough for now. Be well, folks.
Early March Update
Mar. 3rd, 2009 09:57 pmI'm still somewhat offline as I write this. The frequency of the power outages seems to be increasing. I'm not sure what to make of the weird behavior of the UPS. Whenever there's a glitch it won't let me power anything up off it for several hours. Exceedingly annoying. If it's not working shouldn't just not work? Since my UPS has of late been my powerstrip plugging into the wall directly doesn't afford me enough outlets.This room has a shockingly limited number of outlets.
At anyrate measurements have been taken and the needed batteries have been identified and will very soon be ordered. Knock on wood.I figure in about two weeks everything will be back up and running.
In the meantime I'll be catching up on a little reading. Speaking of which could I get some book recommendations for cool things I might not have read yet? Which pretty well means anything published in the last four or five years, really. In particular I'm interested in any new space opera and urban fantasy novels.
At anyrate measurements have been taken and the needed batteries have been identified and will very soon be ordered. Knock on wood.I figure in about two weeks everything will be back up and running.
In the meantime I'll be catching up on a little reading. Speaking of which could I get some book recommendations for cool things I might not have read yet? Which pretty well means anything published in the last four or five years, really. In particular I'm interested in any new space opera and urban fantasy novels.
As some of you know most of my UPSes[1] have been flaking out for the last several months. The one that serves as UPS and powerstrip. for the machine I do most of my internet stuff on, has completely flipped out today. It won't even let me power anything on and doesn't look like it's going to recover as it's been about 8 hours already. That means I don't have access to that machine until I can get either a new battery or an entirely new UPS. Until then I probably won't be able to read LJ, access Facebook (no great loss there), or be available on IM.
I will still be reachable through my gmail account.
[sigh] This is shaping up to be such a wonderful year.
1. What is the plural for UPS anyway?
Edit: Looks like it decided to work. The question is for how long?
Edit 2: Not for very long apparently.
I will still be reachable through my gmail account.
[sigh] This is shaping up to be such a wonderful year.
1. What is the plural for UPS anyway?
Edit: Looks like it decided to work. The question is for how long?
Edit 2: Not for very long apparently.
I have a 200 Mhz Pentium MMX based machine that I bought (very) used in 2000. I got it to experiment with Linux without messing up the system I used for everyday stuff. After a few minor upgrades it worked great and I tried a dozens of different distros on it. It's been a very good, solid backup machine. Although every capacitor on the motherboard had blown by 2004 and all had to be replaced. It now has a bunch of oversized capacitors and is still running all these years later.
Since 2004 it became the machine I run FreeDOS on. There are several DOS programs I still use now and then. Largely stuff I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. Of course, I have it as a dual boot with Linux. That's been proving a bit problematic as all of the major distributions these days are hideous on a machine that slow.
Today I decided to fix an issue I'd been having with the DOS partitions. Namely that I needed two of them instead of just one. That was relatively painless. Decided to install Damn Small Linux this time around for that side of things. That was not so painless. For whatever reason, they pulled a Slackware and assumed the boot drive was hda for the grub install and provided no way to change it. After a number of go arounds I almost opened up the case and swapped around the IDE cables. (My coordination has been bad lately thanks to this bug I had recently and I was worried about doing serious damage to things if I tried mucking about inside the case.) Instead I decided to try installing lilo instead of grub. Lilo, as it, turned out worked fine. After a bit I wrote a lilo config file pointing to both Linux and FDOS and installed it. Worked fine and I set to work updating FreeDOS.
While doing that it occurred to me just what patchworks these operating systems I use are. Version numbers of the key components are wildly divergent and sometimes it's a major pain to figure out what version of what you should be using. The large distributions make this easy by doing the work for you, but with something like FreeDOS if you're not doing a clean install you have to watch it or you'll end up with a mess. Though it goes very well with the hardware which is also a patchwork of disparate components that you can only hope and pray works together with a minimum of conflict.
While working on this I got to thinking of the various computers I used in the 80s. These were all largely fixed hardware sets without the wild variations you see on the modern pc landscape. I'm feeling very nostalgic for those days just now. It was just easier, things made sense.
Recently, at the request of a friend, I decided to try WoW. Got to looking and realized I don't have a machine that can actually run the client software. (Before you say it,sdaemon, no that box can't run WoW. The graphics adapter in it is sadly underpowered, it crashes if you try to actually use the drivers allegedly for it, and it may possibly be the culprit in a couple other strange quirks I've found in the system.)
Since 2004 it became the machine I run FreeDOS on. There are several DOS programs I still use now and then. Largely stuff I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. Of course, I have it as a dual boot with Linux. That's been proving a bit problematic as all of the major distributions these days are hideous on a machine that slow.
Today I decided to fix an issue I'd been having with the DOS partitions. Namely that I needed two of them instead of just one. That was relatively painless. Decided to install Damn Small Linux this time around for that side of things. That was not so painless. For whatever reason, they pulled a Slackware and assumed the boot drive was hda for the grub install and provided no way to change it. After a number of go arounds I almost opened up the case and swapped around the IDE cables. (My coordination has been bad lately thanks to this bug I had recently and I was worried about doing serious damage to things if I tried mucking about inside the case.) Instead I decided to try installing lilo instead of grub. Lilo, as it, turned out worked fine. After a bit I wrote a lilo config file pointing to both Linux and FDOS and installed it. Worked fine and I set to work updating FreeDOS.
While doing that it occurred to me just what patchworks these operating systems I use are. Version numbers of the key components are wildly divergent and sometimes it's a major pain to figure out what version of what you should be using. The large distributions make this easy by doing the work for you, but with something like FreeDOS if you're not doing a clean install you have to watch it or you'll end up with a mess. Though it goes very well with the hardware which is also a patchwork of disparate components that you can only hope and pray works together with a minimum of conflict.
While working on this I got to thinking of the various computers I used in the 80s. These were all largely fixed hardware sets without the wild variations you see on the modern pc landscape. I'm feeling very nostalgic for those days just now. It was just easier, things made sense.
Recently, at the request of a friend, I decided to try WoW. Got to looking and realized I don't have a machine that can actually run the client software. (Before you say it,
sdaemon, no that box can't run WoW. The graphics adapter in it is sadly underpowered, it crashes if you try to actually use the drivers allegedly for it, and it may possibly be the culprit in a couple other strange quirks I've found in the system.)Reinstall - October 2007
Oct. 15th, 2007 05:21 pmIn order to resolve an issue that's been of some concern to me over the past month, I've reinstalled Ubuntu 7.04 on the Compaq this evening. Now begins the process of bringing the system back up to speed.
Updates and Perplexities
Jul. 29th, 2006 10:36 amLooks like the partition and boot record weirdness has indeed been solved. I had some Fedora Core 5 CDs on hand so that's what I installed. grub installed in the MBR without complaint. I am happy about that; the trials of the past week haven't been in vain. Finally I can have my dual boot to Windows and Linux on this machine again! Sadly though, every silver lining has a cloud with the potential for thunderstorms.
I use a Syslink NSLU2 as a file server. I was a little perplexed when it locked up while I was trying to access it to move a few things over to my new FC5 install. After getting it back up and ensuring it was working fine I got back to getting FC5 set up with my favorite applications. Then later I tried to access it from FC5 again and, lo and behold, the file server crashed again.
This is the first time I've ever had this problem, even with an earlier version of Fedora. I've been accessing the NSLU2 from a machine running FC 4 for a while with no problems. I've yet to determine what FC5 is doing that boggles the NSLU2 or why the NSLU2 is so sensitive to whatever it is. At this point I suspect some sort of protocol mismatch or something along those lines. For the time being it's clear that the NSLU2 and FC5 don't play well together.
I use a Syslink NSLU2 as a file server. I was a little perplexed when it locked up while I was trying to access it to move a few things over to my new FC5 install. After getting it back up and ensuring it was working fine I got back to getting FC5 set up with my favorite applications. Then later I tried to access it from FC5 again and, lo and behold, the file server crashed again.
This is the first time I've ever had this problem, even with an earlier version of Fedora. I've been accessing the NSLU2 from a machine running FC 4 for a while with no problems. I've yet to determine what FC5 is doing that boggles the NSLU2 or why the NSLU2 is so sensitive to whatever it is. At this point I suspect some sort of protocol mismatch or something along those lines. For the time being it's clear that the NSLU2 and FC5 don't play well together.
It's back up.
Jul. 27th, 2006 07:51 pmI'm back online with the computer I've been trying to fix the last few evenings. There are some oddities but it looks like it's back up and running mostly as it should be.
Ended up using the combination of an older disk image and recent NT Backup files to restore Windows 2000 to a state resembling what it was when I started this mess.
Now the question is: can I get Linux installed on it without further complications?
We'll see.
Ended up using the combination of an older disk image and recent NT Backup files to restore Windows 2000 to a state resembling what it was when I started this mess.
Now the question is: can I get Linux installed on it without further complications?
We'll see.
Explanations and expansions
Jul. 26th, 2006 11:39 pmYes, I'm still alive, a little frustrated and annoyed though. I'll take a moment to explain a little about where the trouble lies.
The issue that started this was that when I swapped out boot drive, I used the Seagate tools that came with the new drive to copy files. It was crap but it sort of worked. However it set up the partitions in nonstandard ways and messed up the boot records making it impossible to install a boot loader like lilo. I've been without linux ever since.
This week I decided I really want linux back and between the two 120 gig hard disks I have in that system there's plenty of room. I have other machines with linux installed but the P866 is the one that's really fast enough and reliable enough to run all the nifty GUI internet tools comfortably. So, a few days ago I set out to fix the problem once and for all. How hard could it be to find that drive overlay crap that the seagate stuff installed and fix the partitions? It's not like I didn't do stuff like that all the time back in the day. :)
Unfortunately the problem was a little more pernicious than I anticipated. Not to mention these hard disks are a whole lot more capacious than the ones I used to work on.
Some days I really miss the DOS 3.x era. The eighties were very good to me. :)
The issue that started this was that when I swapped out boot drive, I used the Seagate tools that came with the new drive to copy files. It was crap but it sort of worked. However it set up the partitions in nonstandard ways and messed up the boot records making it impossible to install a boot loader like lilo. I've been without linux ever since.
This week I decided I really want linux back and between the two 120 gig hard disks I have in that system there's plenty of room. I have other machines with linux installed but the P866 is the one that's really fast enough and reliable enough to run all the nifty GUI internet tools comfortably. So, a few days ago I set out to fix the problem once and for all. How hard could it be to find that drive overlay crap that the seagate stuff installed and fix the partitions? It's not like I didn't do stuff like that all the time back in the day. :)
Unfortunately the problem was a little more pernicious than I anticipated. Not to mention these hard disks are a whole lot more capacious than the ones I used to work on.
Some days I really miss the DOS 3.x era. The eighties were very good to me. :)
Error: User is an idiot.
Jul. 26th, 2006 09:59 pmThanks to a really stupid move on my part I lost the wonderfully handy drive images I spent the better part of the evening making of the two drives. I zigged when I should have zagged. Order of steps is critical. Simply put I noticed the the boot record on the C: partition was corrupted so, instead of doing the smart thing and copied the image files to another hard disk, idiot that I am, I immediately set out to see if I could get proper boot records in place, including the MBR. Not only does the MBR contain the boot code it also has the partition table for the drive at the end of it.
ARGH!!!
Well, I still have the Microsoft backups of the system so all is not lost.
ARGH!!!
Well, I still have the Microsoft backups of the system so all is not lost.
Semi-Offline
Jul. 26th, 2006 04:20 pmJust thought I'd post a quick note for anyone who might be looking for me on ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, or AIM. The computer I use for my day to day internet stuff is down. I decided to fix an annoying problem with the system that cropped up after the last hard disk replacement. I thought it would be a fairly simple thing to fix and all I had to do was settle down to it for an evening and get everything straightened out. I was wrong.
I don't know when I'll get the machine back up and running. I've got a few ideas of how but all of them take time. I'm starting to think my best option might be to zero both its hard disks and reinstalling everything fresh.
That said; if anyone needs to contact me, please either email me or if it's urgent call my cel.
I don't know when I'll get the machine back up and running. I've got a few ideas of how but all of them take time. I'm starting to think my best option might be to zero both its hard disks and reinstalling everything fresh.
That said; if anyone needs to contact me, please either email me or if it's urgent call my cel.
