Electronic items know how to piss me off, yet make me happy at the same time. Immediately after I’d posted that “oh no, my camera died” post, I plugged the batteries back in, and it “worked”. In fact, I took this photo of me looking pretty non-plussed using it

The lens no longer jams, and remarkably, the camera is, at this moment in time, working. However, when the lens extends, there’s a definite noise difference, so the problem isn’t “fixed”, it’s simply “working now”, and I’ll still expect a complete failure of the lens mechanism in the very near future.

Oh, I can’t believe this has just happened. In fact, I have a little lump in my throat as I type this, but I have broken my trusty little Acer camera, which has been the stalwart of my photography since winter 2006. Over those 4 years, it’s not been far from my pocket, capturing the entirety of my trips to Edinburgh, Paris and Berlin over those past 4 years, along with many thousands of other images which have resided mainly on my flickr account since then.It’s even seen uses in situations where my main camera is a bit too bulky to carry around

Unfortunately, as quickly as it came into my life, and filled it full of wonderment, it exited, and has already left a gaping hole. I was taking some random photos earlier, mainly of a delicious curry I’d made, complete with incredibly undercooked chillies, when the batteries ran out. “Gah”, I thought as the lens retracted, and the power went off.

I slapped it in my trouser pocket, and proceeded to take the charger upstairs with me. As I bent over, to plug it in, I heard a shuddering crack. Knowing that there was only one thing my pocket, except for my keys, I knew something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

And, indeed it had. My faithful little Acer, had, for some reason, switched itself back on and the lens had fully extended while in my pocket. I’d say that I’d accidentally switched it on with my massive penis, but these jeans are quite thick and the “on” button is quite small, meaning that any accidental button pushing with my enormous phallus is highly unlikely.

I removed it from my pocket to find the lens jammed in partially, After switching it off and back on, the lens motor sounded particularly unhealthy, and the lens got stuck halfway. I was presented with a “lens error”, and the camera switched itself off.

I’ve enjoyed using it, and have put it through probably more than it was designed for. The case is scratched to hell and back. The lens cover itself would occasionally get stuck when opening, The screen’s cracked, and there’s dirt on the sensor, as shown here…

The dirt is that little dark patch on the left, in case you didn’t know, or are thick. As can be seen in that photo, however, is that even after that amount of time, it still takes a good picture.

The batteries are on charge, so hopefully after a small amount of charge, it’ll be good to go again. It’ll be a sad day when it finally enters that little bit of drawer space in the sky.

I have managed to break the CPU fan on Beastbits. Honestly, after all of the things I’ve done to it over the years, this has to be the most stupid, and painful. It has suffered from dramatic fan noise over the past few weeks, sadly caused by the fan on the ‘newly’ replaced power supply (it’s actually quite a while ago now).

Whilst I was looking for a way to lessen the noise, I moved the wires around the CPU fan, even though I know they had nothing to do with it, and managed to catch my finger in the CPU fan, shearing one of the blades on the fan, and leaving my finger with a nasty red blotch on the tip.

This means that the fan no longer works, and therefore Beastbits is out of action for now. And I have a poorly finger to attend to.

Yes, unfortunately, mercuryvapour.co.uk did indeed suffer some more downtime last night. It seems this server has some major issues with Apache. According to the hosts, if something stops working, such as Apache (the web server software), then it’s supposed to restart it. Clearly, this didn’t happen, as it went down at 21:30 last night, and didn’t reappear on the interwebs until 00:45.

It’s clearly not the first time this has happened, as you can probably tell by my constant whinging over the past few posts. I really hope that 34sp get to the bottom of this.

In other news, the weekend has been an entire write-off! I’ve done absolutely nothing, and most of the time has been sat in front of my shiny new keyboard typing bletherings over the internet. I shall let this continue, and also give a little bit of an update on my hard drive situation. I still don’t have a solution to this.

You may remember my update to the original post. Basically, I ruled out the drive as being faulty by connecting it via a USB2 adaptor. It worked fine. that was on Vista.

Now, the machine I wanted to connect it to (my “media” server) is running Windows 2000. Not much of a problem. Especially when I connected it and got the “Your hardware is connected and ready to use” message. Fair enough. I entered “My Computer”… Hmmm, no drive appeared. A bit strange. I knew it was formatted (that fucker took 12 hours) and that the USB adaptor wasn’t faulty.

Right clicked “My computer > Manage > Disk Management”. It didn’t see the drive either. What the fudge?

I entered Device Manager, and noticed that instead of saying the model of drive that was connected, it simply gave me “USB Hard Drive”. No model number, or anything of use. Aaaargh.

I was spitting blood at this point. Predictably, the SATA > USB unit came with a tiny driver CD. This didn’t help, as the driver disk included only had drivers for Windows 98SE. No drivers for Windows 2000! The drive is still completely useless to me.

I have one last ace up my sleeve before I invest in a PCI SATA card. I’ll know by this time tomorrow if my hair-brained solution has worked. The PCI SATA idea has taken a set-back, however, as it appears you can’t get SATA 300 PCI cards, only PCI-Express, which none of my systems have.

I really don’t need another external 1Tb drive, but that looks like what I’ll have if this doesn’t work.

This post may not be suitable for anyone under the age of 18. I’m going to shout and swear a little. This post does not contain a solution to the issues listed below… yet. It does, however contain a load of technical jargon that nobody in their right mind will understand. Ah yes, I’m going to to off onto one of my little rants about the state of computers. Or rather, just my computers.

Whilst at work a few days ago, I decided that my little MP3 server at home could do with a bit of a boost. It’s currently running 2 IDE drives, 1 60Gb IBM Deathstar, and a 200Gb Maxtor. The 200Gb drive is completely chock full of stuff, and the Deathstar is ancient and noisy, I really didn’t fancy putting anything on it that I could risk losing.

Off I toddled to my normal place of computer hardware purchasement, Ebuyer. I noticed that they had a Samsung 1Tb drive for sale. A Spinpoint HD103UJ, should you care.

Now, I’ve had “trouble” with Samsung drives in the past. My first 500Gb drive was a Samsung, and it began to show signs of dying within 3 months, though this technically may not have been the drive’s fault. This 500Gb still serves a purpose, however. its magnets are now used to keep the oven door closed since the handle snapped off it.

I ordered the drive, after deciding to give Samsung another chance, along with a few other things… another keyboard, which I intend to use at work, and a SATA/IDE to USB adaptor.

Despite the fact I paid nothing for the “super-saver” delivery, it was delivered within 36 hours of me placing the order. The doorbell rang, and I hurriedly rushed downstairs, met the UPS guy with a grin from ear to ear, ran back upstairs clutching the afore-mentioned parcel, and ripped it open like a kid on Christmas day.

I’d just finished nights, and the drive was cold, so to avoid any possible condensation damage, I decided to leave fitting the drive until I’d had some sleep.

I awoke at roughly 6PM, looking forward to the procedure of opening the machine, taking the old 200Gb drive out, connecting the new 1Tb one, then connecting the old drive via USB, copying the data over, ghosting the 60Gb system drive, writing the image to the 200Gb drive, making the 60Gb redundant.

It all sounds so very seemples (squeak).

Firstly, i disconnected Beastbits so I could use the power cables and the monitor so I could actually see what I was doing. I took out the old drive, fitted the new one via SATA, and powered on the machine. The SATA detection screen came up…

“No devices found”.

Confused, I checked my connections, and sure enough, I’d not connected the power cable to one of the molex connectors. Bohh, fucking idiot.

In it goes, reboot, aaaaand, yes, “No devices found”.

This was the shit that I’ve always dreaded. It means that the drive is a SATA 3.0Gbps, and my motherboard is a SATA 1.5Gbps. According to the scrappy little pice of paper you get with the drive, “you should switch your drive to SATA 1.5Gb/s speed with a software which we are providing via www.samsunghdd.com”

Um, OK. I couldn’t see how a piece of software could possibly help if the hardware can’t actually see and detect the drive. I played along, and found the appropriate software on the Samsung website. It came as an ISO image. And, the only machine capable of writing ISOs in the whole of Mercuryvapour Towers is Beastbits, which was sat on the floor, totally disconnected.

Almost in tears, I swapped the computers back, and burned the ISO to a DVD, and swapped them back again. Lo and behold, the Samsung software totally failed to recognise the drive, so it was impossible to change the settings.

Now, I’m not disfamiliar with the whole “SATA 1.5/3.0″ issue, and I know that all of my other drives have a jumper you can change to allow it to work. This particular drive does indeed have a set of jumpers on the back…

Unfortunately, these are undocumented. Nothing on the label of the drive, nothing in the shitty little scrap of paper you receive.

I spent the next 20 minutes looking for a hard drive with the jumpers still attached to it, so I could use one of these. Turns out both jumpers do absolutely nothing to rectify the issue, and the drive still remained undetected.

OK, fair enough, I couldn’t do anything with that computer. It was a lost cause, so I thought I’d try and connect it to Beastbits to see if I can get it to detect. Success! Er, sort of. It would get as far as the SATA detection screen, and it would hang.

Note how the first drive has the size printed next to it, but the Samsung drive doesn’t? Yes, that’s because there’s a known issue with the SATA controller on my motherboard with drives over a certain size! JOY! It’s well documented here.

Seems like the only solution is to get a SATA controller card and hope for the best. and there wasn’t as much ranting as I’d originally planned. But for now, I have a 1,000Gb paperweight. Tits.