Part one of.. who knows how many. I actually started this last night when I got home with the backup portion of the whole farce. Farce? Yeah well nothing’s really gone as smoothly as it did during testing, and there’s really no reason for it all. Granted, I’ve moved from a regular IDE Harddrive to the SATA ones in my machine, but is that really enough to throw things out?
Ubuntu installed without problem, detecting the SATA drive and allowing me to partition it as saw fit. I created two equal partitions of 58,000MB which left something like 1.2GB for Linux Swap. Formatted and installed Ubuntu, no problem. Yet.
Downloaded and installed the nVidia Linux drivers using Alberto Milone’s ”Envy” script, which all went OK, but the desktop just wouldn’t default to 1600×1200 (only one monitor at the moment). I could select it in the nVidia utils and apply it, but it wouldn’t stick.
Installed Windows 2000 on its partition, only for the install to balk at adding some drivers from the motherboard CD and trash the whole thing. I sighed, reformatted and reinstalled the partition and away we went again. Second time lucky, but it took hours to download and install all the frickin’ patches, highlighting a major, major difference between Windows and Linux updates: Ubuntu downloaded all updates in one go and installed the lot with no hassle; Windows downloaded and installed, rebooted, downloaded updates for the updates, rebooted again and… you get the picture.
Then the Ubuntu network died. Seriously, what the hell? It had been working flawlessly right up until the point where it decided not to, with no warnings, errors or anything. I reinstalled the whole OS hoping it would fix both this and the desktop resolution problem but to no avail, and I eventually went to bed at 2AM.
So this morning I hunt around the network config file and, on a hunch, delete the entry for my second ethernet adapter. I don’t have a Gigabit switch anyway so it’s kinda pointless. This brings the network back up instantly – Huzzah! I type ‘ubuntu resolution problem’ into Google and find a forum entry about configuring X from the terminal, run through the steps and – praise be! – my desktop is now in the correct resolution. I still have no idea why this should cease working just because I used SATA, however.
For a data drive I dug out a Win98 install CD and formatted the whole drive to FAT32. This part went suprisingly smoothly, althoug it was a pain waiting the best part of an hour for it to format. I went and had a shower… and read a book… and went out to post a letter as well. Zzz… I’m currently at the point where I am reformatting the drive using TrueCrypt to create an encrypted partition. It occurs to me that I probably could have done this in plaece of the FAT32 format but I’ve wasted enough time.
The weekend turned out busier than I had initially expected, what with the Red Bull Air Race on Saturday (cancelled due to bad weather – bah!) and a day out on Sunday. I didn’t really have time to get into the Reformat and Reinstall beyond getting Windows on there.
I spent a long time hunting round for the driver floppy that came with my mainboard because it contained the SATA RAID drivers. Couldn’t find the damned thing anywhere and then realised the drivers were probably on the CD anyway. They were, but I couldn’t read any floppies at all until I opened up the case and found there was no power cable to the floppy drive. Sigh.
I got the machine formatted and installed Windows but made the mistake of plugging in my USB 2.0 Card Reader. For some reason, it worked initially but eventually the USB driver subsystem just folded in on itself and the drives disappeared. I initially got a BSOD every time I restarted – something about the Driver IRQ and usb???.sys – but it keps disappearing before I thought to write it down. I tried reinstalling the mainboard USB drivers but, nope, no go.
So I’ve basically reinstalled Windows again. I eventually went to bed after 1am having got Windows installed and all the patches applied. I think I’ll plug the USB drive in as the very last thing and see if that helps – if it doesn’t I’m pretty much screwed.
That would be the big Reformat and Reinstall – time to scrub the HD clean and reinstall everything to make it more efficient, safer and anything else I can think of.
You know how it goes: You start off with a machine that’s pretty lean and mean and eventually things just pile up, like dust in the corners of a room, and your machine is slowing down with all the new registry entries that breed deep down in between the DAT files. Eventually you want to scrub the whole thing and start again. That’s the point I’m at now.
Currently I have 2 x 120GB SATA drives in RAID config for speed and accessibility, and this week I purchased a 250GB IDE Western Digital Caviar HD – £55 delivered from here – for backing up to, using a removable bay to make it easier.
The idea is to create a 200GB encrypted virtual drive using TrueCrypt and have all my work in there, plus tweak programs like Outlook so it saves its PST files in there, IE/NS/FF Browser shortcuts and so on. Then, once a week, I’ll copy the entire 200GB file to the new drive and stick it back in the safe, which is pretty much where it’ll live for the rest of the week.
I haven’t decided how I’ll perform the copy – might just be drag & drop, might be using a script, or maybe even SyncBack, who knows? I may even fire up VB6 and write something, or at least get BootBlock to do it.
And if I don’t update for a while, you know something’s gone horribly wrong.
Dammit! I wanted to print out a couple of photos so I spent a few moments putting a nice 300dpi JPG together, went to copy it to my compact flash card and… gone! My W: drive is gone! Along with my X:, Y: and Z: drives oddly – all the slots in my USB Card Reader.
Trying to reinstall the driver I got the dreaded “function driver was not specified for this device instance” error – a seemingly incurable Windows 2000 thing that will not respond to any treatment whatsoever. Believe me, I tried countless ‘remedies’ and workaraounds to try and fix the sodding thing, all to no avail. Well forget it – I’m going to reinstall everything instead.
Various bits and bobs – general chunterings while having a break.
Fog on the Road!
A misty morning, guaranteed to get every nonce showing the world how wonderful their fog lights are. Great. I can see your car at least a hundred yards in front of me thanks to its car-shaped-ness, but put your fog lights on anyway – that’ll help!
Bulk Email Sender Hacking
OK so it’s not hacking as such, but I was playing about with a bulk email sender on the Mac and found that it didn’t check for strict HTML. Ordinarily it adds a TABLE to the bottom of all HTML emails containing something about using the unregistered version (cough!), and it does this by inserting a snippet of HTML just before the /BODY tag. If you do this:
at the end of your HTML email, this little bit of shareware branding gets hidden away.
Dinosaurs!
One of the reccurring dreams I have is of being chased around the streets by a Tyranosaurus Rex. I’ll hide in a room or an alleyway and it’ll appear outside the window or whatever, so I have so scurry off somewhere else. It never catches me, but I wake up rigid with fear. I’m 36 – why is this happening?
AOL Spam-Blocked – hahahah
Sweet, sweet justice. After revealing their Pay-to-Spam-Our-Users scheme recently, it was gratifying to see at least one AOL SMTP server cropping up on the BlockLists. It’s no longer on the SpamCop list which probably means it’s working in the majority of cases again, but it was nice while it lasted.
Googly Adsense
I managed to talk Foo info signing up to Google Adsense via my referral link (the big banner, here) and he’s already raking in the.. uh.. well a few cents here and there anyway. Presumably I get a tiny percentage for referring him as well.
The-Lottery.info
I added a chunk of code the The-Lottery.info last night to allow the owner to enter the prize breakdown for each draw and display it as part of the latest lottery results pages. After pondering it for, ooooh, a whole ten minutes, I eventually came up with a novel way of including default values for the various winning combinations. I though it was groovy, anyway.
Reformat Time!
Gah! I fired up the old laptop today and after it wheezed to a halt into Windows the wireless internet refused to work no matter what. Since I started working in Scunthorpe the laptop has been a dumping ground for all kinds of software (including bulk email stuff, actually) and is generally a mess – time to scrub it up!
Barry McGuigan in Cleethorpes
Barry McGuigan is in Cleethorpes on Monday 24th April at Joe Frater’s boxing night – more details here. I’ll be in attendance as usual. Amir Khan is due at the Christmas show – that should be a good one.
Site redesign
I know I mentioned the DHTML Window Thing (see right) a while ago and how I was going to implement it, but I’ve been thinking of cutting right back on the graphics and going back to plain text instead. The main reasons for this are compatibility and search engine optimisation – all those tables and shit just get in the way really.