HDDs - making millions of people loose their hair since 1956!

I got a Pentium 4 Dual Core based PC from a friend who needed it fixed up and brought on it's feet. It was a custom built PC - therefore - no OS. Obviously, the BIOS was not so much fun to use, so I proceeded with installing Vista... After a successful boot-up from the installation DVD, I quickly reached the end of the quick "next, next, next" based wizard, and was all set to watch my washing machine do it's thing while Windows was installing.

However, I wouldn't be writing this if something didn't go wrong... It did. Windows setup reported that it couldn't make the partition bootable, so setup was canceled. That was the first time I actually saw that kind of error message... strange... Luckily, a quick reach towards my trusty GParted live CD solved the problem by letting me flag the only partition available as "Boot" (why was it not flagged after I used the built in partitioner in the first place!?). At least I thought the missery was over, but when Windows went on to boot for the first time, it died on me. A black screen - basically nothing there to inform me about what happened. Next step: safe mode - didn't help - the boot process froze when loading crcdisk.sys (hm... a clue? See title...)

To make the long story short, I booted the Vista installation DVD again and used the command prompt to start "chkdsk"... Needless to say, hundreds and hundreds of bad sectors popped up. Oh, goody... How typical is this? I could have saved about 4-5 hours by just using a disk check routeine to diagnose the problem! But, wait, aren't hard disks supposed to be reliable these days? How about S.M.A.R.T.? Nope - no reports about a dying disk. So, while I'm typing this, the LOW level formatting bar is at 95%. Very slowly, it will reach 100% (I hope, gulp), and I won't have to horse around with making Vista work. But, the main rule is - if a hard disk gets any bad sectors, the situation will eventually get worse - allot worse, posing a threat to every piece of data on it, and putting me in jeopardy of having to fix the mess a few months later! The funny thing is, I am now actually hoping to see a few bad sectors so that I can return it as broken... Although, I'm not laughing. Actually, I'm hoping to see some god damn SSDs soon! Why oh why must we have such fragile rapid moving parts inside storage devices...? Oh, and, here's one for Microsoft: I know it's not your fault for the busted hard disk drive, but how 'bout a warning? Something like... Oh, I dunno... "Bad sectors detected", perhaps? Or maybe a blue dot on a red screen... Anything! Just cut the users some slack - no black screens.

Edit: It turns out that the HDD was faulty as a wooden leg caught on fire... I got it replaced fairly quickly, and everything is just peechy. Thanks goes out to Asus for notifying me about the failing HDD even though I have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring turned on... (pause)... NOT!

Add comment March 7th, 2008

OSX86 - out of the picture… for now

Argh! You may have won this round Mr. Murphy, but I will triumph sooner or later! After several attempts, I still can't natively run Kalyway OSX Leopard on my PC, even without using FireWire kexts which make my motherboard reset itself, and with using only one CPU core (the "cpus=1" switch)! I managed to boot to the installation wizard, and after successfully installing everything on my SATA HDD drive (one PATA drive I have is not detected at all), the dreaded thing won't boot, dieing on me with a "Still waiting for root device error" (translation: "No, I can't access your HDD, now stop staring at me"). Wonderful... The obvious problem is that my motherboard doesn't support AHCI mode (the advanced SATA mode that OSX works with perfectly), as the MSI customer service has informed me: "P35 Neo doesn't support AHCI mode.". Yeah, my motherboard is an MSI P35Neo - the one of the few rare Intel P35 based motherboards that don't support RAID or AHCI. How lucky am I, right? Now, as a last resort, I will try to get my hands on a 4GB USB thumbdrive so that I can install a copy of MacOSX on that. However, I would suggest on NOT using the journalled HFS+ file system to format it because of the major number of writes that occur during normal operation in this mode, which wears down the flash memory inside the USB drive fairly quickly. It's wise just to stick to plain HFS+, without journalling enabled.

If this works, I'm gonna replace my Recycle Bin icon in Windows with a picture of Steve Jobs... If not, at least I'm gonna have a neat porn transfer device.

Add comment March 6th, 2008