Musicalmidget’s Blog

I suppose you could call my recent computing activities as a kind of “adventure”. In my last rant I mentioned how a new hard drive was causing so many problems. The original hard drive I bought was dead on arrival and was taken back to the shop for a replacement, which I was also having problems with as mentioned in the previous post. I had the replacement drive checked and guess what, it was a dud too. My luck really wasn’t up.

The problems I had installing the dead drives (obviously before determining that they were infact dead) resulted in one of my existing working drives to also die. Sadly, it had a lot of my more important things stored on it. I lost lots of my music collection (most of which I can retrieve again thankfully). I also lost my local development server on which I was slowly producing a new and unique layout for this blog and also a tweaked version of the existing MyBB Mods site. Oh, had I not mentioned those before..?

Again, most of this stuff was backed up elsewhere and as yet I simply haven’t managed to get it all back onto the computer yet. Thankfully, the unfortunately large number of dead hard drives (the new drives and the old existing one) have now finally been replaced with a brand spanking new 250GB drive which works! Yes, it actually works! The new drive installed immediately and I’ve done a clean install of XP onto it which is much less cluttered and better organised than my previous installation. Using the fantastic piece of software which is Partition Magic, I’ve been able to partition the drive up in a way that keeps different parts of the operating seperate, including a partition for Windows, a partition for programs and another for work.

The only one of my previous drives which didn’t die during the last two weeks was, ironically, the old 40GB hard drive I originally set out to replace. It now seems that the problems I found on that drive weren’t so severe after all so I decided to keep it for a while longer. Originally I was just going to use it for yet more storage although the new drive seems to provide more than enough. So, what better use for it I wondered? Ah, how about I finally give Linux a try?

Ubuntu Linux 5.10 is what now resides on that drive. I’ve only been using it about a week but what I’ve seen so far I’m very impressed with. When the old hard drive it’s installed on eventually does give up, I’ll definately be finding space for another Ubuntu installation. It’s so nice and easy to use. Additionally, Ubuntu setup my LAN immediately without prompting me to do anything, which pleased me no end when it’s previously taken hours if not days to get XP to work properly with my LAN. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the icing on the cake was the nice touch of having Firefox installed automatically as my default browser. So, from the very first time I logged onto Ubuntu, my LAN and Internet was ready and waiting.

My only other previous experience with Linux was using Suse 9.1 on a virtual machine previously, although that wasn’t a particularly ideal environment. I’ve learnt much about Linux since installing Ubuntu and so far I’m loving it.

Tomorrow is my last day at university before the easter break. During the break, I’ll work on finishing getting my computer back to normal and probably most importantly, getting localhost up again. Maybe then I can get back to the things I’ve been working on, and you may just see some “updates” around here…

I haven’t been around much over the last week or so as I’ve been having some quite serious computer trouble. A week ago I bought a new hard drive, quite a large one, to replace my two smaller and much older hard drives. That didn’t seem too complex, I’ve installed hard drives before. Complex however, doesn’t seem a big enough word to describe the problems I’ve been having.

Never before has such a simple task lead to so many problems. Trying to add this new SATA drive has highlighted problems with my BIOS, PSU, SATA power connecters and revealed a fault on my fairly new motherboard which has litterally killed one of my old hard drives. Thankfully, it wasn’t my drive containing Windows. Instead, it was the larger of my two existing hard drives that contained all the files I regard as important enough to save, including work for university, various scripts and website related things (mostly for MyBB/MyBB Mods) and a large digital collection of music.

I’ve lost a lot of data on what was a perfectly good drive and a week later I’ve still been unable to get the computer fixed up and the new drive installed. Instead I’ve just been going around in circles. Tomorrow, I’m therefore going to do something I haven’t had to do before in the five years I’ve had my own computer…take it to a shop. I’ve spent so long trying to figure these problems out without any kind of luck that I just can’t bare to spend any more time on it. I’m getting tired and depressed and at times incredibly angry at how something so simple has become such a huge task. It frustrates me more that I built this system myself recently and know more about it than any other system I’ve owned, but it still hasn’t helped me solve these problems.

I’ve got to the point that I simply don’t know what to try next nor what to do to start getting things fixed. Every step I’ve taken in this scenario has sent me three steps further back. The first SATA drive didn’t work, so I sent it back and got another. It still doesn’t work. The old power supply was stretched to provide enough power. There’s now a 500 watt PSU in there and there are still problems. BIOS needed flashing to pickup the new hardware. It flashed successfully but still doesn’t work. I borrowed a brand new motherboard to use to test all the above things and see exactly where the major fault lies, but the motherboard is for a socket 754 CPU not a socket A. Additionally, I’ve lost nearly 100GB and still don’t have the new hard drive in place. I’m just worse off than when I set on this task and think it’s about time someone else had a look at the whole system, hopefully someone with a better patience span than me. It’ll mean me having to live on my laptop for a couple of days but I’m likely to go insane unless I give this a break and let someone else try.

Sorry for the blatent rant. I felt as though I needed that.

It’s been nearly a month since my last entry and quite a number of things have happened. Probably most significantly, I turned 19 last Tuesday. In true celebration style, Andy and I tripped over to Asylum with some of my uni friends on Saturday night for a birthday night out. The theme of the night was pirates and we managed to get hold of a number of bandana’s, eye-patches and inflatable parrots (yes, I just typed that). I managed to get a small number of photo’s of the night, but the quality isn’t fantastic as they were taken on my phone. Depending how they look when I finally get them onto the computer, I may post them to my blog gallery.
Over the past month I’ve had quite a bit of work to do for University hence why I’ve not been around so much. There’s only a few weeks left of the uni term though so it should all be over soon. It seems strange that the first year is going so quick. As for where I’m living, I’m still at home. I’m hoping to hear from the university accomodation office within a couple of days then I should be able to figure out what to do next.

I’ve managed to get back into MyBB a bit more over the last month. The expansion modules that I was working on for MyBB is now out of the door and has generally been quite well recieved, although there are a couple of bugs to root out. Also, development of MyBB 1.2 is coming along nicely and I’ve been able to keep more up to date with that development. There are quite a few new features suggested on the development site that I’m sure people will enjoy in the next major version.

Not the worlds longest entry today, but now I’m going to try and digest all those pancakes. I know that the actual pancake day was actually on 28th February, but we felt more like having a curry on that night, so pancake day moved for the year to tonight.