Firefox 3 “coming soon”
According to this link Firefox 3 will be released soon.
Enough of this bullshit, I’m off to play Sonic 2.
Still no Firefox 3…
Hey, maybe I’m impatient (and maybe I should groups all of these under one post), but 15 minutes have passed, and it is still not available to download from what I can see.
Instead now, I’m getting…
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
You may recall this was the exact same message that appeared when Amazon went down a couple of weeks back.
I’ll keep you informed, I’m *that* bored tonight.
Not having a good couple of days.
Following on from the disaster yesterday, it turns out I’m having major problems with the hard drive in Beastbits. AGAIN. the powersupply and/or the HDD itself is in fact, absolute spunk, and often the drive will reset with the famous CLUNK noise of a broken hard drive.
Daddykins is also still out, which will mean he’ll come back in an absolute state of inebriety, which is something I really can’t be arsed to put up with today.
RIP, Beastbits, part 3. The final part for now
Well, this will be the last time I mention this for a while, as quickly as the problems came, they’ve gone again. After the Boot and Nuke, everything appears to have cleared up. The drive formatted under Linux, and it installed the OS to a degree. It failed while installing some libraries ironically relating to flickr, but that was because I possibly downloaded the wrong disk image.
Either way, it booted up, and I returned to Windows thios morning, and the drive is successfully formatting. It’s up to 14% as I type. The question is, who’s to say that the same failure doesn’t happen during normal use another couple of months down the line. It is, yet another one of those damn annoying computery issues that appear one day, and then disappear the next.
It’s even passing the bad block test on HD Tune now. The big blocks of red have all disappeared.
The question lies, however, if I should trust this drive at all. I might make it last until payday, and then rip it out and get a new one.
Oh, and I know that some of you clearly don’t like hearing about my electronic escapades and malfunctions (Back so soon off your holidays Chad?), but meh. I don’t just type this to comment on everything I do. I type it do that it’s a reference point should the same thing happen somewhere down the line, and also if someone comes here from a search engine, there might be a few helpful tips on getting the drive working.
Therefore, in this situation, my solution… if the failure doesn’t sound mechanical (no clicks from the drive, etc), give Boot And Nuke a try. Yes, you’ll have lost all of the data on the drive (which I’m sure you have backed up all safely, yes?), and yes, it will take upwards of 6 hours, longer if the drive is bigger, but it might just revive a failed HDD.
We shall now return you to your scheduled programming. Or at least we will next time I need the toilet. I shall describe the visit in all of its intricate details. Or not.
UPDATE THE SECOND… Oh, okay, it’s not about my toilet movements, I’d just like to point out just how important it is to do regular backups! Remember my broken laptop? I backed up my entire picture folder (several gigs) and my MAME folder (even more gigs), on the hard drive I removed from it, both of which have been restored. Although, yes, it’s a small proportion of what was on the drive originally (the rest will be restored soon), I can’t help thinking that all of my worrying, and backing up *just in case*, has been worth it.
UPDATE THE THIRD, 16th Jan, 9:30AM
I’ll not create a new post, though I have just started restoring from the backup, and it’s going to take a while to restore. The backup drive runs Ubuntu, and also acts as the OS, which means that there’s a fair bit of disk thrashing going on, And, seeing as doing this blog hardly constitutes high CPU usage, I thought I’d continue. What IS taking up all of the CPU usage, however, is the… thing… that allows Linux to write to NTFS disks. It makes me wonder if this is what caused all of the problems in the first place.
A couple of days before, I’d been using Linux to write out some DVDs. Not important stuff, just things that had built on the hard drive over time. I had a little bit of a thought…. it wasn’t that long ago that Linux couldn’t even see NTFS partitions correctly, never mind write to them… it made me wonder if there were any “bugs” involved. Of course, I don’t know whether this was the case, as the whole logical structure of the drive appeared to be corrupt. Boot And Nuke must have restored order to some degree, by resetting and wiping everything. I like Linux, but I’m going to like it less if things like this keep happening…
RIP Beastbits, part 2
Well, I left it to do the disk check overnight, but during that time it crashed. Oh, the joy.
I managed to get the system back up and running (Firefox is installed on the C drive and is working OK, which is why you’re seeing this), but the integrity of the D drive is non-existant. Occasionally, I get the message that D is not formatted.
Formatting is going to be my next step. Hopefully this may help with it. I have a feeling it won’t.
Aaaaaaaaaand, it won’t format. This drive is goosed, by the looks of it. I’m going to reboot into safe mode and try from there…
UPDATE:
Well, the computer won’t even START in safe mode. I’m guessing that’s down to the bad drive in some way. I also swapped over the SATA cables, just for dafties, to make sure there wasn’t an issue there.
UPDATE 2 @ 7:30 AM:
It still doesn’t want to work. At all. Still not formatting. This means, however, that I came up with a plan so fiendishly clever that Columbo himself wouldn’t have thought of it. And, it involves my old friend Linux. I actually came up with this idea a few hours ago, but ran into problems executing it.
Despite the fact that I’ve been pricking about with Linux for years now, when it came to finding a bootable disk, I had nothing but problems. My DVD writer truly sucks, as it doesn’t read CDs correctly, and all of my Linux ISOs on DVD appear to have vanished, they’re nowhere to be seen. Therefore, I’m having to download a new one. All 4.4Gb of it.
Thankfully, for the first time ever, my internet connection is behaving itself, and I appear to actually have full speed!!!
More coming soon when this ISO finishes.
UPDATE 3 @ 8:43 AM
It’s goosed.
UPDATE 4 @ 6:17 PM
I’ve done a lot, and actually typed a lot about this, but woefully, it seems to have been lost in the ether somewhere. Anyway, tocut a long story short, I downloaded the ISO, didn’t work. It hung up when trying to detect the hard disk.
I booted back into windows, using the WD Recovery tool thing, managed to get the drive to format, to a point. Still couldn’t do anything with it. I ran HD tune on it, and got this…
Yes, more bad sectors than you could shake an infected stick at. I had one last idea. Boot ‘n’ Nuke. The handy little utility that wipes every last bit of information from a drive so you can start from scratch. Could this do anything?
Well, it would take 7 hours approximately, so I went to bed. I awoke to find the drive successfully wiped! Hurrah.
I inserted the Ubuntu disk, and whaddya know? It detected the drive. I aborted the installation, and went back into Windows, and it doesn’t see the drive. At all. Not in Device manager, not in Computer Management, nowehere. Buggery.
Currently, I’m back in Ubuntu, allowing the whole thing to install, though I doubt I’ll get to see it all set up as I’m off to work in a few minutes
Oh, and I’ve fixed the broken image. Ta Glen.
