Boot disk broken: no gaming for the moment

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Dec 292013
 

Had a lovely -belated- Christmas dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. I fell ill at the end of the first Christmas day, so I had to postpone my dinner that was planned for the 26th. My sister fell ill as well. I was recovered enough today, and she decided she would not be a party-pooper and decided to come visit me. I stripped the starters from the menu at her request, and after all we had a lovely evening.

After cleaning up, I went upstairs to play some games. To my surprise, my PC had two black screens with only a cursor in the top left corner. Okay, let’s reboot. Same result. BIOS setup revealed that everything was seemingly in working order. But…..what’s that, only one harddisk. The normal HDD, not the SSD bootdisk. Unplugged the power, unplugged the normal HDD, boot and……

REBOOT AND SELECT PROPER BOOT DEVICE

Meaning the BIOS can’t find ANY boot device while only the SSD is connected. Let’s see what my server thinks of this disk. It’s linux, and it has hot-swap on the SATA ports enabled, so that should be a piece of cake.

And of course it was: to linux the disk was dead as well. On two different ports. After connecting via hot-swap, or after hard reboot.

Meaning: my desktop PC is out of order for now. The SSD has 36 months of warranty, and only 18 have passed. So yes, an OCZ Vertex4 128GB died after only 18 months of (not very intense) use. How fucked up is that?

New disks. Unvoluntary.

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Oct 242013
 

On Friday the 13th we had a power outage. Of course. It lasted an hour. After that my whole house came to life again, except….the TV-signal, my landphone and my internet. Correct, same provider. They had problems after the power got back on, and their problems lasted several hours.

I didn’t think I had any problems, everything in the house seemed to work. Except when I tried to get some files of my NAS disk for work. It died. Connected the disk to a Windows machine, my Linux server, tried repairing the disk with a controller of the same type of disk, but none of that worked. The disk was dead. It contained my photos, my music, my documents, all my downloads and some backups. Great. Because of money issues, the disk was not mirrored. And I found that my latest backup of my pictures was….from July 2011.

🙁

I bought 4 new disks.

DSC_0699

Two 3TB disks to be installed as RAID1 (mirrored disks) in my server, to be my main storage for pictures, documents and the like. And the NAS gets two brand new 1TB disks, also to be used in RAID1. To make things more expensive, I bought NAS-grade disks, which basically can stand being “on” 24/7.

The NAS disks are now installed and I am gradually restoring my pictures onto it.

The period the missing pictures span was certainly not the best period of my life. But there were some good moments I captured. Guess I have to make up for that in the years to come. Let’s charge the Canon, and start shooting.

Multi monitor gaming

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Jun 242013
 

I extended my PC with two old monitors I got from my sister/brother-in-law. An HP1955 and an HP2035, with resolutions up to 1280×1024 and 1600×1200 respectively. Since my main screen is FullHD (1920 x 1080), Eyefinity on the RadeOn 7970 will set the height of all to 1024 when you put them in a group. Giving me a total resolution of 3840×1024. Not the best the card can do, but the best in this setup.

To save me the trouble of constantly setting up the group and gaming, and then switching back to a normal extended desktop (with max resolutions on each monitor), I created two presets in the Catalyst Control center. Easy. Just do your setup, go to Presets (second item in the accordion) and click on Add Preset. Name the preset so you can recognize it. Do another setup and add it too. Now you can switch between the presets by right-clicking on the system tray icon of the Catalyst Control Center and selecting “Invoke preset”. Choose the appropriate preset, and you’re done.

VGA connectors?

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Jun 102013
 

Funny. Just to have some sound and some movement in the background, I turned on the TV and stopped zapping on a channel with CSI:NY. All the latest equipment, super cool gadgets, user-interfaces nobody has ever seen, but still…..they connect their monitors to the PC with…..the famous blue VGA connectors? No HDMI or DVI or DisplayPort, just the age-old VGA connector.

Racedriver Grid in FullHD (1920×1080)

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Apr 142013
 

In my last post I said Grid did not support FullHD mode, but with a little tweaking it does. Grid is an older game, and it probably can’t read all the hardware info from the newer graphics cards. Mine has 3GB of RAM, but the restrictions in Grid won’t allow you to go beyond a width of 1280 when your system has less then 270MB. So Grid must not understand 3000MB.

Here’s how to change the config files. Make a backup of each file first, in case you screw things up.

1) c:\steam\steamapps\common\Grid\system\hardware_settings_restrictions.xml
Find the line containing: 

<res mem="270" maxWidth="1280" />

and change the value of maxWidth to 1920.

2) {userdocuments}\Codemasters\GRID\hardware_settings_info.xml
Add the 1920×1080 resolution by adding the following lines:

<resolution width="1920" height="1080" aspect="normal">
    <refreshRate rate="50" />
    <refreshRate rate="60" />
</resolution>

3) {userdocuments}\Codemasters\GRID\hardware_settings_config.xml
In the graphics_card section, change the resolution settings to something like this:

<resolution width="1920" height="1080" aspect="16:9" fullscreen="true" 
            vsync="1" oldWidth="1920" oldHeight="1080">
    <refreshRate rate="60" />
</resolution>

Start GRID. It should work. It will ask you if you want to keep the new resolution of 1920×1080 and after that you’re good to go. Have fun.

New PC

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Oct 162012
 

Last week my PC died. I was working in Windows, went to the living room for some coffee or something else, and when I came back there was an error on the screen telling me that Windows couldn’t not find this and that volume (the D: drive). Not sure why this was, I restarted Windows only to find that it would not boot without checking the faulty volume.

But it took ages to get even some progress, so I restarted again. Same story. I thought: let’s really powerdown by flipping the switch on the backside of the PC. So I did. Flipping it on again blew out the power in the whole room. And the bedroom. A fuse blew! Restoring the power brought everything back to live, except my PC. Dead as a doornail.

 

Earlier I bought a new powersupply, to no rescure: more was broken. Yesterday I bought a new motherboard, an Intel Core i5-3570 CPU and 16GB of memory to go with that. I installed the whole shebang, only to find that Windows does not like major changes. Windows is autistic. I tried the repair option by booting from the Windows DVD, but that did not help a bit.

So I reinstalling my system now. Great. No dataloss I guess, the data is not on the Windows disk.

Back on decent hardware!

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Jul 152012
 

The domain switchbl8.nl now runs on a PC/server again. I replaced the motherboard, processor and memory, and ditched the old 9GB SCSI disk in favor of a 60GB SSD from Adata. Also, the system now runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64, no longer the unmaintained 7.04 (in 32-bits).

 

The gallery is not back yet, gotta find out how to reimport/recreate the original structure, but as you can see, the weblog is up and running.

New server…in time

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Jul 092012
 

The Synology works great. Mailserver, WordPress and Gallery work as they should. But compared to the (outdated) server, this thing is SLOW. Uploading three pictures to the gallery takes about 15 minutes. Adding posts, or administering this weblog makes me wait for the pages to change. So, yeah, the Synology can run “normal” PHP applications, but its CPU and its very low memory make it inadequate to call it a server replacement. Which, of course, it isn’t in the first place.

 

I will be constructing a new server in time, one that can match the old one in speed (2x3GHz CPU/4GByte memory), but will be easier on the electricity bill. For now the choice is between an AMD A-series (FM1-socket) and the lower end Intel CPUs (i3 something). Any advice will be appreciated. The Intels seem to consume a considerable amount less power when idling, but they are twice the price of the AMD and have lousy graphics.

Silence!

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Jul 062012
 

Since the weblog now runs on the Synology, I decided to switch of the server until I need something of the disks it has. A normal shutdown, and then….

 

 

–{ SILENCE }–

 

 

I love the Synology.

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