the best laid plans...or how to upgrade your system and loose everythng..

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by bradrinwi, Dec 6, 2005.

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  1. bradrinwi

    bradrinwi Established Member

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    well i have a 2gb memory.. 2235 mem time 7800 nividia 3200 amd on an abit an7 with 5.1 speakers..

    But it wasnt easy

    I run a dual boot system 98se/xp sp2

    since all my changes were hardware and none related to the hard drives i didnt worry about my data..

    also in this case backing up my drive wouldnt have helped...

    first mother board i get doesnt post.. past the cmos..(one of those rare times i miss dallas batteries..)
    next ..mother board works great..so now ive got a 7800 asus 256 on an abit an7 with 2 1 gb modules of fast corsair mem...

    it boots.. gets to drivers..and reboots.. and reboots

    etc

    when i select the win 98se config it boots successfully..
    win 98se is old enough that it doesnt care about all the changes made.. that are troubling winxp

    for the record mbr rebuilds reg hacking restoring.. low level formating .. and all manner of fixes do not work...
    win xp gets very upset and coming back home and seeing.. its house completely redesigned....
    (a light here.. a painting there.. maybe a new room no problem but when you change win xps home completely especially on a dual boot it gets very upset...)
    so the only yes really thing i could do was re format/reinstall xp and drivers from scratch... of course now i have 2 options win98 win xp pro and win xp pro. when i boot but it does work ..
    of course i lost my data durring the re format and since my bootable 98se cant read an ntfs drive.. i couldnt sabve my toee stuff...
    so my project has been considerably set back...
    until i re do stuff from memory and notes.....


    but hey I did get a very nice computer system out of it..

    so anyone planning to do a majour over haul of your system make sure youplan for the worst . just in case it happens..
     
    bradrinwi, Dec 6, 2005
    #1
  2. Moosehead

    Moosehead Rubber nipple

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    two physical harddrives man... always have two harddrives. one for data partitions, one for programs and OS partitions.
     
    Moosehead, Dec 6, 2005
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  3. bradrinwi

    bradrinwi Established Member

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    lol i do have 3 phys hard drives...

    2 ntfs 1 fat 32.. unfortunatly the boot partition had some of my prog tools that were picky about where they loived


    oh btw i discovered an interesting(cough) feature.. of AB an7 and other high end abit boards..

    apperantly they are put together by workers suffering from a peculiar form of coloour blindness.. since its not uncommon for the orange and black plug to be mixed up...

    i read this several times (in different post/sites etc)finding it very easily with some simple searches....


    turns out at least in this case to be true if i plug things in according to colour code then its like someone twisted the sound waves 90 deg to the right.. (right becomes center... right rear becomes left etc.....)
    but if i plug black to orange and orange to black.. then no propblem 5.1 beautiful sound..

    boggle.. reminds me of the explosives i once played with that had printed on them this end toward enemy .
    do not eat

    yes really....
     
    bradrinwi, Dec 7, 2005
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  4. Shiningted

    Shiningted I want my goat back Administrator

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    I'm told by people who care Abit generally make very fast solid motherboards, good for gaming.

    I guess that doesn't help though ;) I have some old MSI thing, first gen of P4 boards, its already destroyed 2 expensive radeons I plugged into it... the ol' TNT2 is chugging away happily though.

    Note regarding WinXP - it sucks at moments like that, dunnit? I remember when one of my Radeons packed it in, XP wouldn't even boot into safe mode... so I started in Win98, 98 automatically used the utilities that came with the Radeon to switch off AGP accceleration and ran it as a 2d card. That sucked obviously but at least I had a wrking computer to run tests with.

    Moral of story? 98 is supported til 2006 (thats weeks away!) keep a copy of it installed somewhere, especially if u have 3 HDDs!
     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2005
    Shiningted, Dec 7, 2005
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  5. bradrinwi

    bradrinwi Established Member

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    1st when i worked in redmond WA and then silly valley Cal it was the un written word from bill down that 98se is the most stable non win NT os they have...
    i of course have a few copies...

    and re abit yes they are great hey i love my mother board...
    but its a well written of peculiarity.. of abits higher end boards that.. the sound plugs are mixed up ...
    conclusion... there must be a geneticlly inheritable trait... regarding the ablity to work with micro hardware..and.. colour blindness
     
    bradrinwi, Dec 7, 2005
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  6. krunch

    krunch moving on in life

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    Uhm, can you say External USB2 hard drive? You could have copied your data to the External USB2 drive before the changes.

    Also, if you had Acronis True Image Personal Edition for 50 US dollars, you could have made a digital snapshot image of the entire hard drive [all of the partitions] that could have been written to the External USB2 drive. And, then, you could have done your upgrade dual-boot where, after the Acronis software would have been installed on the new computer setup, you could use the Acronis software to "explore" the image file and copy data from the image to the new computer setup. Plus, if you decided you hated the new computer setup, you could have restored the image back to the hard drive and overwritten the new computer setup and have your computer back to exactly where it was before you started.
     
    krunch, Dec 17, 2005
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