Fuck you partition magic!

The BBQ Pit
21

Linux is getting better and better at being a newbie’s first OS. It might not be quite there yet, but that’s mainly because of its massive configurability. Hell, some distros (Slackware) will never be newbie-friendly, nor should they be, but I think anyone who has a reasonable amount of computer skills (like Cnote obviously has) can learn SuSE or RedHat.

But there’s this thing about Linux: It’s constantly changing, and it’s changing in various directions at once because of the various distros changing themselves and new ones popping up. Among the new distros, one of the most newbie-friendly seems to be Lycoris. You can play solitare while it installs, and installation is pretty much a point-and-drool process anyway. Of course, RedHat is trivial to install as well, and I’m sure SuSE is pretty simple as well. Lycoris’s main advantage is with those who are switiching from MS-Windows: It has the look-and-feel thing down, and it is pretty close in functionality (save the shell and the whole stability thing :)). It could be a very good thing for the Linux world in general, especially since you can take information gleaned there and apply it to a more Linux-y distro (RedHat or SuSE or Mandrake).

22

OK you guys, I’m ready- tell me how to debug the MBR, because this thing is far more hosed than I had previously thought.

I’ll never touch PM again, ever. That fucking program has so completely screwed this system, I don’t know what to say… Seriously, my anger is gone, my frustration is gone, all of it, gone. I’m just kinda going through the motions right now running into more and more problems. At each turn, I find more things that are fucked on that drive. The conflicting things showing up in WIN 2000 and Win XP aren’t anything I can seem to fix, and the driver issue continues without any sign or sight of a resolution.

A lot’s gone on, and a lot’s been found out on my end on what exactly, or appears, to have happened in the PM fiasco, but when it’s all said and done, that fucking program is responsible for nearly three days of anger, frustration, and at times, shear madness.

That son of a bitching program can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned, because what it did is downright criminal- telling me it did one thing, and trying to get the OS’s to think it actually did something too, when all the while nothing was being changed or accomplished- NONE OF IT!

At any rate, I’ll fill you in on the details of what happened, because in an odd way it’s kind of interesting, but for now I really need to get the show on the road and get that system back to functioning.

The second drive is no disabled- the things unplugged from the cable- and everything on the main partition- the c, d, and music master e drives- has been emptied. She’s ready to roll, and anything that needs to be erased on that drive is fine with me.

Thanks again, I’m in your hands.

23

Since that post was getting long, and considering my luck with things crashing and burning lately, I posted the fucker before this laptop up and froze on me.

For the most part, everything’s accurate, but it got a bit hasty at the end.

Here’s the continuing scoop- C,D, and E, on the main drive (80 gig seagate barracuda) is ready to be toasted. Anything I need on that drive has long since been transferred to the second drive. It’s still in the computer, but it’s completely disabled-- I even removed the damn power supply, just in case.

What’s sitting on the main drive- different remnants of C,D, and E, can be completely destroyed.

What I’d like, when it’s all said and done, is WIN 2000 Pro on a smaller front partition C:, and Win XP, in a much larger partition, on the one after it, D: and finally, on a little partition, I’d like the music master file as it once was.

I know that’s not critical in terms of the MBR debug thing, but I might as well explain my plans so any conflicts or problems in the process can be spotted before I get this process off the ground.

And, of course, the install process will be WIN 2000 (FAT 32, because, well, I don’t know), then XP (NTFS), so as to keep it dual boot and all that fun stuff.

Uh oh, it’s getting long again, better hit submit!

24

OK, forget about the debug thing, I found it.

The things been wurring away for a bit now, and I’ll probably go to bed before it gets done.

Jesus, everytime I start doing stuff in fdisk, I’m constantly reminded of how stupid the thing is- it’ll be hours before the ‘verify’, ‘Checking disk integrity’, etc., etc., etc, stuff is done.

But, but], it’s far better than the PM way of doing things, so I shouldn’t complain too much. It looks like I got it all right, so it should all work in the end.

We’ll about that when it all finishes up… sometime tomorrow night.

In the meantime, I got a neat little TV picked out. Once I check out some other stores tomorrow afternoon, for prices and whatnot, I’ll be back in business with a TV in the bedroom.

And tomorrow looks like another beauty of a day, so I’ll probably bike around and…

Hey, this is starting to sound like one of those live journal things! Can’t have that!!

See ya all on the flip side.

25

#1) Make a startup disk.

#2) No. Really. Make a start-up disk.

#3) Make a gawdamed start-up disk!!!

(Have I stressed the importance of a startup disk?) :wink:

On that startup disk, in addition to all the other stuff that normally comes with one, should be “format.exe”, “debug.exe” and “fdisk.exe” I’m not familiar enough with Win2K to know if these can be found on one of it’s regular start-up disk. If not, just do a search. In Win98 they’re in the Windows/Command subdirectory. But you haveta put 'em on a start-up disk.

Once you’ve done that, reboot to Dos. Again: with Win98 you’d tap the F8 key until you got the start-up menu and then choose “Command Prompt Only”. Just boot into dos however you do it with Win2k.

Type “Debug.exe”

You’ll get a single “-”

At the “-” type the following and hit ENTER after each line (don’t type the hyphen, and the xxxx:xxxx stuff is what you’ll see on the screen, not what you type)

  • f 200 L200 0
  • a 100
    xxxx:xxxx mov ax,301
    xxxx:xxxx mov bx,200
    xxxx:xxxx mov cx,1
    xxxx:xxxx mov dx,0080
    xxxx:xxxx int 13
    xxxx:xxxx int 3
    xxxx:xxxx (Press ENTER )
  • g=100
  • q (quit to DOS)

At that point, reboot with the boot floppy, do an FDisk to repartition, then reboot again. Then Format your partitions and you’re ready to go.

An alternate DEBUG routine can be found here

Good luck!

Fenris

26

Note to self. Read ALL posts before replying. :rolleyes:

:slight_smile:

Fenris

27

Yahoo! I’m back in business!

It was a long, grueling, difficult trip, but the thing is up and running- sound, video, files, all of it.

It’s the weirdest goddammed thing, but this is how it went.

After reading up on how to debug the master boot record, I went ahead and did it. After that, I set the partitions and re-formatted the space. All was going fine, but it took f’in forever (I’m sick of swearing. I simply don’t have it in me after the last few days).

I get to the point of installing Win 2000 on the first partition… all goes fine. I start loading in the drivers and get to the sound card driver. I cross my fingers and pray the damn things will load this time.

“Invalid Data- Installation cannot complete”

You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve done it all. There isn’t a thing left I can try. I’m tapped.

I fully resign myself to having zippo in terms of audio for the next… I didn’t know how long. As far as I knew, the card and/or the device was toasted, and toasted for no apparent reason. The damn thing had worked before, and now it wouldn’t.

I decide to keep on going. Seiously, I can’t go on like this any longer- Three f’in days spent on this thing and nothing, not a single thing fixed to the point that it’s acceptable. Fine.

After this, I might as well load Win XP into its partition. I’ll deal with the stuff later, because for now, I really need to get some stuff done that I was doing in XP.

Again, with no resolution in sight, and not a single person at Hercules (The makers of this… this… thing, around to answer a single fucking (I guess I do have it in me) question. Assholes.) I trudge through the process, not knowing at all if it’s something that will ever get fixed.

Fuck, about all I can do is try and sell this card and get something else. Dammit all.

At this point WIN 2000 is loaded running smoothly, outside of the obvious audio problem. Time to move on to the XP deal.

Start loading the thing and a neighbor stops by. He’d been by during the previous attempts at this thing and saw how it was going- horribly bad.

He’s fairly inept when it comes to things computers, and the number of times I’ve had to do things on his comp to get things running numbers in the… well, it’s up there. But, he’s a nice enough guy and we’ve always gotten along.

At this point I’m basically in the early stages of the XP install and essentially my role is pressing return and whatnot- my attention was on anything outside of the comp or what it was doing (Hell, I’d done it enough times it was routine).

“I was talking to a friend at work today and I was telling him about the problems you were having”

“Mmm-hmmm”

“He wanted to know what kind of video card you were using”

“Video card, why would he want to know that?”

“What are you using”

“Why the he… All right, it’s a Leadtek Geforce4…”

“Yep. That’s what he thought”

“What he thought? How… what… what are you talking about”

“He was saying people are having problems with the Geforce 4 cards and their audio cards. He asked me specifically, ‘Is the guy using a new video card? What is it’”.

"Nahh, come on. It’s not going to be that. Yeah, I just got the card, and it’s new and all, but it ran bef… :: I actually started running through what I had done before and realized the audio drivers were on the thing before I’d installed the video card. It fits what he says, but it doesn’t make an lick of sense. It also occurred to me about that time that I was talking to a techno-tard-- he wouldn’t understand my not understanding it would be connected to the video card. He’s sitting there looking at me with that glaze, that glaze another person gets when they don’t understand a wit of what you’re talking about. But behind that distant gaze was a glint of confidence that what he said was correct.

What followed was as futile attempt on my part to try and convince him why it couldn’t be the video card (Basically I was talking out loud, trying to convince myself it couldn’t be possible).

But shoot, I’d tried everything in the book, and nothing was working. And the more I thought back on the previous installs during the last couple days, it did occur to me that one of the first things I did was to install the video drivers because the OS was thinking the second monitor was the main monitor. It was hard as hell seeing what was going on using the second monitor, so I immediately installed the video drivers so it’d kick back into normal mode and use the ‘real’ main monitor.

So there was that going for his argument, but I couldn’t believe, or convince myself, it was the issue- it couldn’t be.

Literally minutes after he stops by and then leaves, XP is done doing it’s thing and is now running for the first time. It’s on the secondary monitor, like before, so my immediate thinking is to load the video drivers and get things ‘right’.

But I don’t. I think to myself, ‘Hell, you’ve tried everything else, why not try and load the audio drivers onto the system before the video drivers, maybe there’s something to his friends comments. If not, about all that’s left is removing the new card and throwing the old one back in. At least it’ll resolve what I think is a stupid notion- that a video card driver could affect the sound card. I mean, you changed the PCI slot, so that should have taken care of any IRQ issue. You were going through the list and knocking each one out without much success. Why not. Humor him, humor youself.’.

So I try it. Using the little monitor I start the process that’s failed countless times before. I pull up the audio drivers and click to install. The thing reboots and what was once a fleeting sense of hope surprisingly started to come back.

'Device Detected-- Device Drivers being installed"

H-O-L-Y S-H-I-T… That’s it? That’s it!?! That’s it!!! The fucking video drivers?

No fucking way.

doo Doo DOOO… tinka tinka tinka

SOUND! Beautifull Sound! Oh, OH how I’ve missed you!

I think I actually shed a tear. A small one, but it was there.

I was so incredulous to the notion it could be that, the fucking video card, that I went back and fired up the WIN 2000 partition. I uninstalled all the video drivers, and even removed the monitor driver, and fire up the audio driver and see what happens…

‘Device Detected-- Device Drivers being installed’

Son of a bitch. It’s the damn video drivers.

How? Why? I don’t know. All I know is that I have sound, beautifull, glorious, SOUND.
I honestly don’t know what would have happened if the neighbor hadn’t stopped by when he did, and if he hadn’t brought it up to his friend. The chances that it all came together, at the exact time that it could have all worked out… the idea of it coming together the way it did couldn’t be predicted-- it was the definition of sheer chance.

But there you have it. It did all come together, and now all is fine- sound, video, all of it, it works, and it works like a charm.

The whole process still amazes me: the problems with Partition Magic, the amount of time I spent going through all of its shit, and how it morphed itself into other issues, issues that almost had the best of me, it all resolved itself.

The whole thing is amazing, simply amazing.

By far, the strangest couple of days I’ve ever had… and hope never to have happen again.

Thought you all should know.

28

Oh, I almost forgot- the TV comes in at the end of the week. I dropped a lamp today and its shade shattered to hell while I was cleaning the windows, but my downward spiral seems to be ebbing- a new glass lampshade is far cheaper than that TV.

HOPE!

29

Not one response?

Probably one of my best follow-up posts actually discussing and describing theresolution of the problem (Something you never see around here, the resolution part) and there isn’t a single comment?

What about how it all came together? The shear chance of it all? What about the problem itself? Am I the only one to think that a) it’s the dumbest fucking error message out there, and b) that it’s goofier than hell that a monitor driver would play such a role in a sound cards drivers installation, and operation?

I was stunned when it all finally worked. The bizarreness of it all, the interlacing problems and how they affected each other, all of it.

:: Tap Tap Tap :: Is this thing still on?

30

cue Jaws music
Don’t let your guard down yet…

:smiley:

31

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t encourage more comments…

32

At the very least, you owe your neighbour a beer. And then maybe you can send him over to repair the Pentium 200 motherboard I cracked when I was trying to remove the dead power-supply. Fuck AT cases!!

33

You have lived through the deepest darkest valley that is system troubleshooting, and learned the real secret of its appeal: it feels so good when it ends.

34

Since things seem to be calming down, and I’m getting back to normal, fuck 'em, let him get his own beer.

Nah, I’m kidding - I look forward to buying him a beer. Hell, it’ll finally be a reason why I’m buying the beer.

Who I really owe the beer to is his friend. I’ve met him before, and to be honest, I initially thought the guy didn’t know what he was talking about. But he nailed this one, so I have to re-adjust that thinking.

What I don’t understand is how the guy knew what he knew, and more importantly, how easily he was able to quickly narrow it down. I spent hours searching, reading, and exploring sites that dealt with Hercules and this driver. Never once did I run into the problem I was having. At one point I even was looking in the video section of some sites to see if anyone else’s problem resembled mine.

Out of all of that, only once did I run into a problem only a tad bit similar than my problem. It was close to mine, but it wasn’t it.

I checked and checked. I did everything you’re supossed to do when a problem like mine comes up, but I’ll be dammed if I ever got close to what the real problem was.

To that guy- my neighbors friend- I owe some serious beer.

35

Hells bells.

I was just poking around and noticed the infamous sound card is sharing an IRQ with the relatively new graphics card.

Now I had looked at this when the sound card driver issue was going on, but it wasn’t obvious at the time that the sound card wanted that same IRQ too, so nothing popped up out of the ordinary.

Now my understanding of the IRQ assignments is that with newer designs, it doesn’t matter if they share the wire. Is that right?

If it isn’t, and it’s a bad thing, how can I change these settings when both devices don’t want to allow it (Win XP/Win 2000)?

I suppose that answers why I had problems with the audio card, dammit all, but you’d never know it by that arcane error message.

And, believe me, after this, I’m ready to let this thing drop down and die, but since it was relatively active, and has to do with things in this thread, I thought it more appropriate to add it here than start a new thread in GQ.

Thanks.

36

Sharing IRQs isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on what’s sharing with what and in what PCI slots. Soundcards often share IRQs, IIRC. If all is (finally) working then my advice is to back away slowly and don’t tempt fate.

37

Thanks Hodge, it not being a big deal is what I remember.

I’m still going to contact the Video Card people and see if they don’t have a fix since the card is giving me some grief. I don’t know if it’s an IRQ issue, or it’s a wrong driver, but it isn’t working as well as it should, and I’ve tried every available driver out there so far.

God this nonsense gets frustrating. What makes it worse is all this new goddammed platform stuff. In older versions of Windows, I’m sure the sound card thing would have revealed itself differently, in terms of that stupid error message. I might have figured it out since I’m more experienced with previous versions of windows than this one. And given what the issue could be, it’d be a simple matter of heading into the device manager and changing around the IRQ’s. At the least, if it didn’t change anything it’d tell me that was the wrong avenue to pursue. But with this XP shit, and the constant new platforms and way of doing things, I’m up the creek- XP apparently doesn’t like people playing with the IRQ’s.

Grrrrrr.

With every passing day, I’m growing more and more tempted to trash the thing and head on over to the Linux side.

38

It seems we’ve had very different experiences with WinXP vs. Win2K. I had nothing but headaches with Win2K and endless compatability issues. Many hardware manufacturers took forever to get around to supporting it and some didn’t even bother. I spent several hours on the phone and sent dozens of emails to Kodak trying to get W2k to recognize my digital camera’s USB connection. I tried just about everything to get their pitiful, hacked together W2K beta-drivers working but eventually admitted defeat. I actually setup a dual-boot W98/W2K system just so I could download my digital photos! But at least they tried. Canon, on the other had, just outright said that they weren’t going to bother updating drivers for many of their exsiting printers. It was either dual-boot W98 or buy a new printer. Fuckers. Last Canon product I ever buy.

Anyways, I was in my local computer shop yesterday (remember my cracked motherboard?) chatting with one of the sales people (these guys know their stuff, unlike the drones in the big box stores) who’d heard many people bitch about Geforce 4 drivers. He made a point of telling me he always buys 2nd generation cards to avoid the buggy drivers that are inevatibly released with cutting edge products. Makes sense to me. I’m still using a Geforce 2 but, before that, I’d used ATI cards for years before I got disgusted with their abysmal driver support. I guess it’s an industry-wide weakness.

39

Part of my problem is jumping from the Win 9x (95, 98 first and second release) platforms to NT (Win 2000 and XP). It wasn’t anything I wanted to do, it was just sorta thrust upon me.

That in itself created problems on my end, but sheesh MS, let’s try to stick with something here. All this changing around how things work gets frustrating.

Believe me, Linux looks better by the day.

In terms of the Video thing, I agree- it’s a pain. Personally, I’m sick of the theory that you need to wait a year or two before you try out the then new technology. I’m willing to put up with a bit of grief simply because I want it newer and better. But this video card, and in turn the audio card, has me re-evaluating my thinking big-time. Some of this shit simply isn’t worth it.

The problem with all that is the trap of marketing, or hope on my end, ‘This years card is the best ever. Stunning graphics from a quality manufacturer who’s been doing this kind of thing for years!’. I’m a sucker for that stuff. I actually believe they have it figured out, or at least able to f’in run.

I’m quickly learning, though.

40

OK. This is about the last post I make in this thread bitching about this and that hardware wise.

A fast recap-

I get a new video card, a Leadtek a250 Geforce 4 4400, install the thing and hope everything is great.

The card starts sputtering and I’m not happy. I decide a re-fresh is in order and start the process (Silly me, I think it’ll take an evening at most).

Refreshing the system turns into a nightmare and I realize partition magic has fucked me from the start. Enter this tread- I’m ticked, and I voice my opinon about that bullshit product. A product- again- that purports to make things easy.

The truth is? When it’s worked, it’s worked like a charm. But when it’s failed, it fails like a son of a bitch- you’re fucked, no two ways about it.

Second problem comes up dealin with the sound card. All should be fine, because the previous installs and versions of the program worked on the ststem I’m running, now they don’t.

I get pissed and get frustrated at the lack of support I can find.

I figure out that problem- to a degree- and move on to different problems.

I’m still willing to put up a fight for shear reason that I hope what gets accomplished justifies the time spent getting things working.

So far? About four out of five things resolved. The biggest? The vidoe card.

Enough is enough, there’s only so much a person can put up with-- tomorrow I return the Leadtek A250 44000.

I’m done. I can’t do this shit any longer.

Take it back and give me my old card, the thing actually worked.

This has all been a long and torteous trip, but I hope, if anyone is still following this mess, that someone, anyone, has learned something by all this. I learned a lot by following the same kind of thing following a different story, on a differnt board.

The thing is, both he and I have realized the only resolution is returning this stupid card.