Computer Problems

March 12th, 2009

At some point in between feeding my Twitter addiction and getting a Poker website ready I decided to reformat my big computer after putting up with a few problems for a long, long time. Silverlight was bombing on me, Google Chrome was locking up (blaming Flash) and nothing really worked as it was meant to.

The initial reformat and reinstall went OK, but during the Windows Update->Reboot cycle I got a Blue Screen of Death and things went downhill from there.

My SATA refused to boot. Thinking this could simple be a corrupt MBR problem I booted from my XP CD into the recovery console, tried FIXMBR and FIXBOOT and restarted. I got the same problem – invalid system disk – an decided to reformat again completely. Two hours town the pan so far, but what the hey.

No deal – I still can’t boot from SATA, so I waded through the BIOS options, resetting to safe defaults and going from there, and still my SATA won’t fire up. I eventually removed the Work drive to a safe place and reformatted my backup drive – a 250GB PATA that’s normally in a removable mobile rack – to boot from. This went OK, and I installed Windows, Office and all the combined updates for both.

What’s annoying is that the SATA drives themselves are absolutely fine, mounting in Windows no problem – I just can’t boot from the damned things. I’ve tried all three that I own, two 120s and a 250GB, and they all respond the same. No booting.

I still needed a backup drive, so I plonked down £9.98 on a SATA mobile rack and reformatted the 250 SATA for use as a backup. The idea is that I copy all the files over from C: and D: (now partitions on the 250 PATA, rather than individual SATAs) using SyncToy 2.0 and yank it to store in a safe place. I originally had both my work drive and backup drive encrypted with TrueCrypt, but I just don’t want to push my luck right now.

So now I he a pair of 120GB SATAs sat doing nothing. I could possibly set them up in a simple striped RAID0 config so store my work on, then reformat the PATA as one big lump, but do I really want to go through all that hassle? It’s not as if I need the space.

Sigh… Bloody computers.

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Enermax Liberty 500W ATX2.2 PSU

December 30th, 2007

As detailed in my original post, I’ve been struggling with a disappearing D: drive for quite some time now. To date I have:

  • Bought a new drive.
  • Used a different SATA connector
  • Used a different SATA cable
  • Used a separate SATA card

None of which helped in the slightest. I finally stumped up some serious cash (excluding an entire new HD, because it was twice the size of the old one) and bought a new PSU, the Enermax Liberty 500W PSU from eBuyer. It did, indeed, solve my problems, but I feel the PSU needs elaborating upon.

The standard glossy cardboard packaging doesn’t prepare you for what lies within. The first thing is the Molex/SATA power cables which are separate from the PSU body to allow you to only used as many as you require. There are standardised ones for board power, but the drive cables are use-as-you-please to assist with cable management. As a nice touch, the Molex power connectors employ a ’squeeze-to-release’ design to make things that little bit easier.

That should be enough, but Enermax are heavily involved in the gaming aspect of computing, and as such you’ll also find case stickers, what appears to be a bookmark and even a lanyard for your all important computer game show ID. All Enermax branded, naturally.

As usual, a serious PSU weighs an absolute ton and is built like a tank. The housing sports a humongous fan requiring lower RPM and thus reducing noise, and everything just works first time. An advantage – at least for me – is that there are no bright blue LEDs casting an eerie glow around the back of your tower.

Some made-up numbers:

  • Build Quality:10/10
  • Functonality / Ease of use: 9/10
  • Price: 8/10
  • Overall: 9/10

Not cheap, but a very good unit, so worth it.

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