I’m not about to call the bug police, as it’s probably well documented with them, but I’ve just had an annoying problem with the wonderful piece of free software named CDBurnerXP.

I fitted a new hard drive yesterday, as well as a new DVDRW drive. My old one had almost entirely packed in.

I burned a test disk with Nero, and it seemed to go through fine. CDBurnerXP, however, failed to recognise the drive. I also noticed the drive had gone from My Computer. Odd. It was still in Device Manager, and working. Sooo, I did a system restore. Just to see if it did anything.

While I did that, I suddenly twigged. I’d played around with the drive letters in order to get my new storage HDD as D:

The system restore was useless. No drive. Aaaargh. Soooo, I right-click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management. Sure enough, the drive had no drive letter assigned to it. I quickly sorted that out, and mapped it to E:

The drive then appeared in My Computer, and was also detected in CDBurnerXP.

Therefore, if you ever fit a new drive, and CDBurnerXP doesn’t detect it, make sure it has a letter assigned to it. It’s odd that it picks it up my the drive letter instead of the physical drive attached to the machine, like Nero did. Hope this helps someone in their moment of panic.

It’s obviously common sense too, but hey, we all have our blonde moments.

/me sits back and awaits the barrage of comments from offended blondes.

Technorati Tags: cdburnerxp, new dvd drive, not detecting drive, Software, windows xp

Sigh.

OI is down, due to an emergency upgrade. According to 34SP, that is.

Also, I can’t even get into IRC, as the HDD I use with mIRC on, is disconnected, thanks to that faulty cable, and my laptop is downstairs, so I can’t even access that (read: far too lazy to go downstairs get it powered on, stick USB drive, etc) to get mIRC.

So, it looks like it’s just you and me, tonight, trusty blog…

And, of course, the Carlsberg.

I have ordered the new hard drive, so that should be with me shortly. I say shortly… I have no idea how long that’s going to be, as I went for “cheap bastard” delivery…

Technorati Tags: carlsberg, down, irc, mirc, obscureitnernet

This is another one of those blogs about my ongoing hard drive saga. I know everyone loves them, so I thought I’d update with what is hopefully the conclusion of the saga.

I still haven’t got around to replacing the drive. This mainly because I was waiting to get paid, which I have now been. Er, anyway.

Today, I was once again playing around with the drives, and linux in general. I connected Windows up for a few seconds so I could get something off the drive. The bad drive kept slowing down, spinning back up, and eventually stopping, freezing the system on the boot screen. This was obviously getting worse.

I swapped both sets of cables, and then the known good drive clunked on boot-up. Hurrah! We were finally getting somewhere. It just had to be the cables.

In an unrelated incident, I had to swap the drives one more time, and as I was just about to put it back together, I finally, FINALLY found my problem. The SATA cable plug was completely knackered, to the point where it literally crumbled to bits the second I touched it…

You could even smell it was faulty. It smelled like it had been burned. I’m guessing this isn’t through the heat of the drive, but more likely the plug being damaged and the data lines arcing as they disconnected and reconnected and generating heat.

I can’t believe I actually considered the cables to be at fault, never actually bothered checking them physically, and discounted them out of any wrong-doing. What an idiot.

I could have solved this problem out months ago. I might not have even needed to replace my “original” 250Gb drive at all. When it originally went all schitzoid on me several months ago, spewing out random bad sectors for absolutely no reason. Although I did swap the cables at some point during this whole… thing, I swapped them back.

The more I type this out, the more I realise it’s the cable. A stupid, little, shitty, orange piece of cable, priced less than a fiver.

So, at the end of the day, I have probably ruined a perfectly good 500Gb drive, due to all the constant clunking of the heads, and left a 250Gb drive sat on the shelf doing nothing for 6 months.

Therefore, I’m going to put in another order at Ebuyer. Another drive (I won’t go for Samsung just in case, just in case, though I no longer believe this drive is at fault, and its problems can be blamed on the cable), and a handful of SATA cables, including of course, some spares. The old hard drives will of course serve some purpose in the future. I’m going to explore the likelihood of converting my media server over to Linux, as I don’t need very much software on that… a working VNC connection, and a way of getting the webcam working properly.

Technorati Tags: broken, cable, crashed, diagnostic, error, hard drive, samsung, sata

Well, my previous posting about Linux has got off to a GREAT start. I spent half an hour waiting for the 3.6Gb DVD image to download. Then I tried to write it to disk, and got “Power Calibration error”. Turns out the DVD was duff, apparently as another one worked fine.

And, as I went to look at the name of the disk image itself, it turns out I’d downloaded the AMD64 version instead of the 32 bit version. Sigh.

So, I’m having to start from scratch, and I’ve wasted a blank DVD.

Therefore, if anyone is reading this, you’re from the UK, and would like this DVD free of charge mail me your address and I’ll pop it in the post. Seems a bit of a shame to bin it.

Too late. Clearly everyone thought I am a psychopath, or was going to turn up to their doorstep and nick their milk, or something. The DVD will shortly find a new use.

Technorati Tags: downloaded, error, free dvd, Linux

Ah, once again I have stepped into boredom territory! Therefore, I am going to whip out one of thee hard drives in Beastbits, and install Linux onto a fresh one.

I wonder how long it will take before I get entirely bored by the idea. Again.

Technorati Tags: install, intrepid, Linux, ubuntu