Just read excellent article on dual booting in PCW (UK) June 09 edition.Wish I’d read it before setting up XP/Vista/Ubuntu last week 🙂
Jun 07 2009
Weekend Update
We are over at the in-laws right now, packing up our stuff to take home. Hopefully we’ll be meeting up with Walton to take Anna to the park, and perhaps grab a bite to eat.
The Xbox updates are still not appearing regularly or in order, so I’ll need to work on that. The entrecard widget will be removed when the current advertiser’s slot is complete, as I find the scheme is no longer generating anything like enough traffic to be worth it. Also Bluehost seem to have reliability and speed problems once more, this last week, so I seriously need to look into alternative hosting companies.
Anyway, Anna is doing just fine, our main PC has just been upgraded/complicated to triple-booting Vista now, as well as XP and Ubuntu, and I really appreciate the air-con we have back in our flat – Kazakhstan is warming up pretty well already.
Jan 21 2009
Waiting For A Foreign Dawn
The last few days I have been trying to sort out Dave’s laptop. Unfortunately, he is in Astana, which makes technical support a little difficult. With the assistance of LogMeIn, we discovered that his old install of XP was shot. We put a new customised one on, and discovered that this too was not a stable platform to operate on. Unfortunately, we didn’t get far enough this evening for me to be able to carry on with this new OS install, as there is still no network connectivity. As David is using our flat, where ChrisK+GF live, he has a curfew to follow, and so had to leave this evening (as it was already a lot later over there).
Jun 04 2008
PC No Longer In Pieces :-)
As I mentioned previously, our main PC had a major failure with the hard drive that had Windows and all the apps on it. It is most probably just a coincidence, but this occurred directly after I updated my on board audio drivers. Upon rebooting, I was presented with an error message stating that HAL.DLL was corrupted. Not a problem, I’ll drop into Safe Mode and find which CAB the file is compressed within on the XP Install CD, expand it and drop it into place. Another reboot bought up multiple file corruptions, including BOOT.INI . As the hard drive was only 40Gb, and was already second hand, I decided now would be a good time to finally insert the 500Gb drive I got for Christmas from Mum. Having fitted the drive in (not as easy as before, as there were still another three internal drives attached), and installed XP, I discovered that the install process had decided to make the boot drive L: ! This caused issues with some driver installation programs, and I discovered that the Windows Disk Management util could only reassign letters to non-OS install drives. So, using a few different utils, I recovered the faulty hard drive to the point that it could be read again, and rescued every directory I could. In the end, I only lost my Firefox bookmarks, in terms of important non-backed up data, so all that was left was another OS install, hardware and their respective drivers to be added on at a time, and now that I have 500Gb to play with for just programs, all the programs I could lay my hands on to install.
Anyway, things are now settled down enough for me to return to my normal routine on this PC, so thanks to those people that were patient enough to wait for me to respond to e-mails and comments.
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May 31 2008
Slowly Getting There…
I have finally recovered as much data as possible from the corrupted hard drive, and due to the last install of XP deciding that my new main hard drive (with the OS on it) should be L: , I’ve opted for another fresh install of XP. Anyway, normal service should resume in a few days time. To those that have commented, I’ve approved all the non-spammy ones,and will try to reply soon.
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Mar 16 2007
The End Is Nigh…
Unfortunately, since I ended up re-installing XP just prior to getting my ADSL connection working & therefore downloading a lot of updates, I’ve used up my 700 meg quota this month, so I’m back to dial up for the rest of the month 🙁
Not many UK friends seem to be reading this blog right now anyway, judging from the IP addresses of visitors, so you’ll probably only end up asking my why I disappeared the next time I’m on-line in Messenger, but it was worth a shot.
Before I forget, if anyone knows :
a) Where Windows Update downloads are stored, and if you can simply copy them across from one install of XP to another, to save downloading them all over again
and/or
b) Why I’m unable to remember a simple list of two things whilst typing out the first
then PLEASE leave a comment below….
Finally, thank you to the random blokes from Britain who kept me & Ira entertained last night on Skype – I’d just used the ‘Skype-Me’ mode for the first time, and they were looking for people on-line from strange countries to talk to. I’m apparently 46% chav & 31% emo, according to the questionnaires they sent links for!
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Nov 07 2006
Been A Bit Lax At Posting Recently
Apologies. I’ve been a little distracted re-building a PC for a friend. I had everything just right, all working, and secure (he had stability & security issues that couldn’t be sorted out without a re-install of XP). The final update was to bring the BIOS up to date – it had had a few revisions in 14 months. Unfortunately, for the first time ever, I appear to have killed the BIOS whilst flashing it. The board is supposed to have a 2nd BIOS that gets used if the first is fried, but it hasn’t come into play, no amount of keypresses or floppy disks with binary images & flashing programs have helped. As I did the damage, I’m using up the last of my birthday money to replace the motherboard. Except, of course, that particular model isn’t stocked any more, so I’m trying to find a suitable upgrade for him.
On a more positive note, my brother and dad are hopefully coming over to visit us, around New Year time, and Losha, may be coming with us to the UK for Xmas 🙂
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Nov 02 2006
New Experience
A friend dropped their PC off today, to sort two issues…
First was easy enough, their portable (USB) hard drive required more juice than his motherboard/PSU could supply. Unfortunately, the drive didn’t come with a separate AC/DC power supply, although it sports a socket for such a transformer. Given the state of finding normal power/audio/video accessories over here, I’ve suggested an easier solution, but less expensive than grabbing a new PSU for the PC. I double checked, and as long as it is of the powered, rather than passive, variety, a new USB hub should solve the problem. Unusual for a USB hub to be the solution to a problem, rather than the cause, but there we go. This way, the USB is only used for data to/from the PC, the power is supplied completely separately by the hub itself.
Next we have a fun issue, where, seemingly at random, the windows GUI flips out and reverts to Windows 98 flat style. No particular software or activity seems to trigger it, so I finally got round to obtaining a Russian Windows XP disc, and will have a go at restoring explorer.exe and ntoskrnl.exe to their original states. If all else goes wrong, he hasn’t reinstalled XP since he got the PC, and some of his friends pride themselves on their l33t hacking & ‘virus’ writing skills, so I’m backing up his entire personal data collection over night (damn D-Link router runs @ 100MBit, not 1GBit, I’m now too lazy to disconnect and patch up direct one to one…) Also running anti virus scans on full depth once xfer is complete.
Had a nice meal and drink with him and his parents (friends with the in-laws), and introduced them to Angel Delight (Andy & KZBlog, you know your days are numbered :P). Already got Igor hooked up to Marmite…
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