Wow, what is this thing? *poke*

Okay, I’ll bore you all with geektech. I bought a 1gb SanDisk Ultra II CompactFlash card today. CF cards are like gold because they can be adapted directly into a real bootable hard drive for a PC. Just… a flash hard drive. That’s like, awesome. I had a 512mb CF card but it was like, slower than crap, and painful to watch. It was also half the capacity needed to really run a usable computer system. I tried running it as my server but that lasted about a week. I hope to make this one an extension to my great site, Hostfile.org, as some kind of alternate traffic site for static files.

Anywho, started off with a CD I already made, that had XP RTM (SP0) custom made and ready to go. It wouldn’t install though, because despite being stripped to the core, it still had the 1.06gb limitation in place… it wanted 1,064mb where I only had a 1,024mb drive. OH, DARN! Okay, so I run the data back through nLite for a quick tweak pbum and remove the limitation. Burn it back to disc, and boot it, then install it. Lo and behold XP cannot place a swap file on a “removable disk”, which is what “C:” comes up as, so… I have no swap file. I immediately find where the n00b computer techs come up with the idea that no swap file is a bad thing (I run all possible computers without a swap, just fyi). Crash, crash, crash. I’ve been having to fight with the video card too, apparently it doesn’t like this board. Did I mention I’m working with an AMD K6-2 450MHz system, that’s just sitting without a case on the edge of a table? Hehe. Yeah.

Anyway… so I ditch that and build an XP install with SP2 and all the updates, same configuration, stripped down, and with the limitation removed. I pre-install the installation files to the card (yeah, it even has room for that) and hack the install files to run from the hard drive (CF card) instead of the CD. I plug it into the computer and boot it, but errors run amok. Errors, errors, errors… so I go back, copy it over again, try it again… back and forth, recopying, installing, random errors, blah blah blah… WTF! On and on and on this crap goes, I burn a CD-RW that I can’t get the CD drive to read (apparently, so I thought), I reburn onto a DVD+RW, verify it, and find that it still can’t read it. This is now like, three hours into tweaking with this ****ing thing. So I pop in my UBCD and run Memtest-86 and find some obscured memory locations that aren’t returning the right data. ****! No wonder. I had a bad stick of RAM. Probably not connecting properly but I’m too lazy to **** with it again.

Yank the stick, install a 32mb stick in its place (total 160mb now, remember, no swap possible)... and it’s much happier. It’s still installing behind me. No errors so far. ^_^

Stupid RAM.

Go F-16s. Rah rah. Lemme post a few thumbnails and ****, from my uber awesome website. Because I rock.

posting in thread

I just wanted to bring up a very severe issue with this “custom installer” maker that I encountered tonight…In the setup batch file, the (mis)use of “XCOPY” to completely overwrite the Program Files folder with the Nero contents of the Program Files folder completely cripples a system that uses a mounted drive as its Program Files folder, due to what appears to be a bug in Xcopy (which I haven’t used in years!). That means, that the system ends up with a dislocated Prog…

Man, working in the field has shown me ALL SORTS of exotic PC problems I can barely even begin to describe.

This is an interesting one. Booted from UBCD4Win, I found the hard drive plugged up with, literally, every flavor of rogue antivirus and antispyware you can imagine. I cleaned all that out with Autoruns+Runscanner and some file creation time sleuthing. Everything has been removed that I can imagine.

But the root problem still remains. It doesn’t jam during startup, but it switch video modes (to the graphics mode) and show the desktop cursor. It gets to the point *right* before the screen usually flickers and shows the cursor and starts up, but… nothing happens on screen. If it was on Autochk (it’s a FAT32 partition… I have no idea why), it shows the first ”.” after finishing, and the screen hangs there. If it was on the Windows logo, the screen goes blank and stays blank. But the hard drive keeps churning, and I’m thinking “Aaaaaand….”, like it’s about to give me a cursor. No dice.

Now, here’s the head scratcher. It responds to keyboard (numlock/caps lock, etc), and the power bumon brings the computer to a graceful shutdown instead of crashing off. The HDD churns and the power shuts off in about 2-3 seconds, like it really is shutting down. What on EARTH can cause this kind of behavior? Any ideas?

edit: It is definitely running behind the frozen screen. I also tried VGA mode, and installing another video card. I did Ctrl+Alt+Del twice after I gave it about 15 seconds to start up and settle down the HDD activity, then did Shift+Tab, typed “Administrator”, hit Enter (this is after using login bolt-cutters off a boot CD, to erase the Admin pbumword so I could get some work done), and the HDD took off again. I had headphones plugged in, but it seems not to be set up to use the onboard adapter (it had a Creative soundcard installed that I removed for diagnosis), so I didn’t hear any sounds. I tried Ctrl+Alt+Del to kill Explorer (CAD, “E”, Delete, “Y”Log in to see images! but I only now remember that the default tab isn’t Processes, so that wouldn’t’ve worked anyway, and it screwed up the rest of my sequence.

But it’s definitely running in there, just not showing me anything on the screen. In the recovery console I also checked for suspicious services or drivers with “listsvc”, but didn’t find anything except “mnmdd”, which Google tells me is a “frame buffer emulator” – i.e. a fake video card. I disabled that, no effect on the problem. I’m stumped, but I’m going to try to SOMEHOW get remote desktop turned on, and access it from the network. I’ll have to set that up blindly… woohoo!

edit edit: Reinstalled the Creative card in its original slot. Did the same sequence – CAD, CAD, Shift-Tab, “Administrator”, Enter – and guess what? The XP startup sound blared through my headphones, while the screen was still at the Autochk error screen I caused by renaming the “BootExecute” key to “Bootxecute” (diagnosis). Now I’m certain it’s sitting at a Windows desktop that I can’t see. Hmm…

Holy ****, if you actually found my long lost half sister, I’d love to know where she is, or even what her name is. Sweet.

Obsessed

Alrite. The iRAWR **** was moderately lol the first time. Second time it wasn’t. Now it’s just plain flat ****ing re-re annoying. Does anyone care to join or not?!