Sorry for my lack of posting

I was recently involved in an auto accident and have been dealing with that pretty much all the time. Also, with PAX fast approaching much of my time has been monopolized. Apologies all around, I intend to get back to a regular schedule of posting once the accident situation has been resolved.

Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Videos: The Truth about Cleveland

I'm sure people are sick of me posting about my broken computer. So here's a break. Some hastily made Cleveland Tourism Videos. The sad thing about these videos is that they're true. Brings a whole new meaning to truth in advertising. I don't know who this guy is, but these things are addicting (to me, at least). Enjoy!

The Changeover, Part 3 - The Deadening

Just when you thought the tale was over, it continues. Last Thursday marked the arrival of the SATA card. Wonderful, right? Wrong. Thursday also marked the power outage that destroyed that computer. After spending days trying to pinpoint the problem, it came down to the motherboard/CPU. Basically, the computer is dead. So now, not only can I not use the data on my TB drive, I can't use the Linux computer at all.

Not a problem, right, since I have a closet full of computer parts? Nope, sorry. The only motherboard/CPU combos that I have are all Pentium II era parts save for one AMD Socket A board with 900MHz processor. It's a step down, but should do the job. Unfortunately, I can't find a single hard drive in the apartment that will work anymore. I have a stack of almost ten defunct drives that worked at one time or another, but are no longer suitable for running an operating system. Granted, that is just an assumption, as I have no definite way of knowing if the motherboard and processor are any good, nor do I know why they were locked away in the closet. When it comes down to it, the whole thing is just a guessing game that leaves me jumping from part to part trying to get something to work for more than twenty minutes.

Just yesterday, I thought I had it, a drive that worked. It seemed promising. Xubuntu installed and booted. I left it alone for a few hours while I went out with my girlfriend. After dropping her off at home, I came back to it and installed one new package. Suddenly (though no fault of what was installed) the computer freaked out on me. I attempted a reinstall and everything was fine until after I installed a package again. Suddenly, trying to start processes yielded either nothing, or they would start and crash in seconds. I clicked on the shut down button on the top panel and suddenly the panels disappeared. I rebooted the machine and the desktop wouldn't even load. Just a light blue screen with a mouse. I couldn't even right click! Needless to say, this is endlessly frustrating and I'm still not sure the power supply is 100% good, but I have no tester to be sure.

This is the single most frustrating week of my life right now. Exams weeks don't even come close to comparing to what I've been going through, and it's still not over. I'm not even sure where to go from here. I might just smash the whole thing to bits, who knows? Whatever ends up happening, I've either got a whole mess of trouble or a whole bunch of money to spend. I'm not really to fond of either option. Maybe I'll find some miracle hard drive that will make everything work and make the computer smell like roses.

Fat chance.

The Changeover, Part 2 - Forcing it to work, and why that's a bad idea

As you may recall from last time, I was attempting to make Windows 7 read my ext3 drive. After much finagling, using bcdedit to turn on test mode to allow ext2fsd's unsigned drivers to install without Windows deleting them, I managed to get Win7 to read my ext3 drive. A miracle, right? Everybody said it couldn't be done, but here I was having done it. Well, it's not as cut and dry as that, unfortunately. Upon first glance, there were minor latency issues. Browsing the drive took just a little bit longer than it did to browse the various ntfs drives on the system. Dismissing this as negligible, I proceeded to set up streaming to my 360. At first, I decided to try out the Media Center Extender. This didn't work at all. As soon as I got past the "enter this pin into Media Center" the whole thing crashed. No big deal, I would just use Media Player 12, right? Wrong. WMP12 decided to only scan the watch folders it liked, and very few of those were on the ext3 drive. So, as anybody would do, I moved onto Plan C. This involved mapping the drive in the linux machine (which has no SATA ports, or this would all be moot), and sharing to the 360 through that. Once that was set up, it looked good... for about three seconds. Then the Win7 box BSoD'd to death. I had to test this a few more times to be sure, but basically any time an external program attempted to access the ext3 drive, the whole computer crapped itself.

My next attempt was to use colinux or andlinux to run as a Windows process, map the drive, then share it using Samba. This came to a quick halt as neither programs support x64 processors.

So, it seems that my adventures with ext3 in Win7 have come to a stopping point. There are no other viable options for making this work short of buying a SATA card for the Linux box. That's exactly what I have since done. Once said card arrives I will be moving said hard drive over and I can put this whole ordeal behind me. Still, it saddens me that this didn't work out, as for a while there when things were working and hadn't started crashing yet, I was sort of proud what many people (a few who had worked for Microsoft) said was impossible. I guess they were right in a way, at least until somebody out there throws together a stable driver.

As a final note, none of this would even have been necessary if Microsoft would support alternate file systems!

That is all.

The Changeover, Part 1 - Windows 7, Xubuntu 9.04, Synergy and ext3

Recently I decided to change the designated functions of my various computers. A few factors drove me to this: increased difficulty surfing the Internet in Linux, current inability to play PC games (due to Linux and the active desktop being four years old) and the fact that my most powerful machine was sitting in the closet playing media server. The decision to try out the Windows 7 Release Candidate came when my XP install disc kept BSoDing while starting the setup.

My primary intent was to use Synergy instead of multiple monitors, allowing my keyboard and mouse to pass seamlessly from desktop to desktop (and sometimes to laptop). I made a list of various functions and what computer they would be relegated to.

To start things off, I wasted two DVDs because the first ISO I downloaded was faulty (thanks Microsoft!). Third time was a charm, after downloading it again, and off I went (after sleeping for the night, since downloading twice took too long). So, away I go. I install Windows 7 and various programs. Then it comes down to Synergy. I set up the Win7 machine to be the Synergy server in this instance, as it's monitor is in the center (between the Xubuntu machine and my laptop). This worked great until I wanted to move the mouse back to the Windows box. Apparently there's a bug that prevents you from being able to do so without killing the Synergy client on whatever box the mouse is trapped on. This problem was simply solved by running the server on the Linux box. Simple, right? Not so. Apparently Win7 refuses to allow me to click on certain things when connected through Synergy. Namely, any window that appears in order for windows to gain user permission to execute a task. In other words, every time I went to install a program or run a program by an unknown publisher. Basically, I had to keep a mouse plugged into that box while installing any and all programs.

Next came my greatest challenge. I don't know why I'm using the past tense, as I have yet to solve this problem yet. My terabyte drive, which is 80% full, is in ext3. There are a couple programs that allow a person to mount an ext2/3 partition under a windows drive letter. Unfortunately, none of these solutions are functional under Win7. So, my 800GBs of data is currently inaccessible. I'm hoping to find a solution that doesn't require me to buy new hardware, but it's looking like I'm going to have to buy a PCI SATA card for the Linux machine and install the hard drive in there.

Another thing that's not working under Win7 is my PCI IDE card that has two hard drives plugged into it. That should just be a matter of finding working drivers, which I'm hoping can be accomplished tonight after work. Still, this changeover is proving to be a lot more work that I had hoped for. With any luck, this won't take too much more work. Unfortunately, I don't think luck plays into this equation.

To be continued...