Time to vent. There are reasons why there are computer viruses!

JCitron

Trainzing since 12-2003
Okay, I've had it with Windows, Microsoft, Asus, HP and any other hardware manufacturer, or big bloated software company that comes my way!

Today I got a SMART error with one of my hard drives. Being the paranoid one I am, and the fact that I got hosed about 2 months ago, I made a beeline to BestBuy and purchased a couple of new drives. A big 2TB WD for my Trainz stuff, and a new 1TB boot drive to replace the drive I had in there already. I was going to two 2TB, but they only had one drive, so I opted for the 1TB and the 2TB instead.

The hardware install is keyless in my case. I simply unplug the drive from the holder, screw the new drive in. I don't even have to power down my machine! This I put the new drive in a different slot, and hotloaded the new SATA drive. All I needed to do is format the new drive and clone my data in one shot. Done, easy scheemzy, no problem so I thought.

This cloning process was going to take some time, and since I still do not feel well because of the stinking pneumonia bug and the Parkinson's Disease, So, I went off to take a long nap. Besides lately, my patience level has been about 2 milliseconds if that, and the best thing for me to do is to step away before I snap someone's head off when they bug me. It seems no matter when I try to do something, I get bugged by the dog wanting to go out! There could be three people in the room doing nothing, and he'll come over to me no matter what! He usually waits until I'm positioned so I can see into my case. At this point, I have the screw driver set into a screw, which for me is a chore and half because I tend to drop the screw at least 20 times before I can screw it in, and the flashlight positioned in the other hand perfectly so I don't shine the light into my eyes, which I seem to do about four or five times before I get it positioned the right way.

Anyway, today I didn't need to open the case, but he had to bug me anyway. This time he waited until I was concentrating on the disk clone! I went off for my nap once the process got going, and when I got up, my PC had turned off, or so it seemed? I was puzzled because I was sure I had turned off power management in Windows because it always screws up stuff like Trainz and other graphics applications. Apparently there was an additional setting on my motherboard for PM that I didn't find when I first setup the system. When setting up systems, this is one of the first things I turn off, and yes I turned off some of the PM settings, but there were some new ones that I missed somehow in yet again a new menu!

What happened is the system had gone to sleep and shutdown in the middle of my data clone, and corrupted the boot sector of the new drive to a point where even Window's setup, on the Win7 DVD, wouldn't recognize the drive. Now this supposed 2 hour process finished 8 hours later, after fiddling with the drive, booting up my bro's system, and blowing away the dorked partition on the drive, I was finally able to dupe my data. The thing is, in all this time, I could have done a fresh install of Windows, Office, even Trainz if I had to, and would have been up and running before I got done farting around. Luckily I still had my old drive, and I was able to boot off of that one, but I had to fiddle with BIOS settings again for the system because somehow they got all messed up and my old drive wasn't recognized either!

By now I was so mad I was fuming. I could feel the heat barrel out of my shirt as I sweated. No wonder people write viruses! This isn't to get a thrill, or to sell them to the Russian mob for a profit, it's because the people have been burned, ticked-off, or worse screwed over by these miserable dorks at one of the computer giants. These developers love to write wizards and fancy interfaces that do nothing for the practical side of things. A simple BIOS interface, instead of menus, would be a lot easier to use. Software too has been getting worse too. Windows and the stupid wizards now makes assumptions worse than Google's search! Oh, it would be nice to go back the simpler times when we were able to simply install hardware and software without bowing to computer gods and farting around with confusing menus and wizards!


John
 
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what a mess

John,

sorry to hear what a mess and yess big is beautiful if you sit at the receiving site.
small is better if the other side is competent and knows at least as much as you do.
wish you more luck the coming days and get well soon.

Roy;)
 
John,

sorry to hear what a mess and yess big is beautiful if you sit at the receiving site.
small is better if the other side is competent and knows at least as much as you do.
wish you more luck the coming days and get well soon.

Roy;)

Thank you, Roy. The frustrations, oh the frustrations of today! My patience level is finally rising up. Once I got the data cloned, I was able to boot off the new drive.

At this pointm, I have about 45 minutes more of data copy happening of my data, not the boot stuff. This is a manual copy and paste of all my Trainz stuff. Hopefully when I get up tomorrow (it's 02:30 here or close to it), I won't have a BSOD like I had before when my system originally crashed.

John
 
..... Oh, it would be nice to go back the simpler times when we were able to simply install hardware and software without bowing to computer gods and farting around with confusing menus and wizards!


John
You forgot pesky dogs...
 
And if you wern't so nice to your dogs in the first place, they wouldn't bother you so much!
I find that imitating their sounds and mannerisms pisses them off so much, they go away in aggrivated disgust! (That kinda implies you have no aversion to lying down with dogs!)
 
Dogs??? & Hard Drives!!!

Hi John,

I really feel for you! I have a dog also, and now, after reading your message, I firmly believe that dogs have started a revolution.

As for hard drive failures and corrupted data. I have had trains now for quite a while, starting with 2006, to 2010, and I noted that trainz does have a high HD access. Actually more so that most software. This access may be the cause of your crashes.

I have replaced 3 1T drives so far, and yet in the past prior to Trainz have run drives for 10 years without failure.

Since then I have finally decided to Mirror the drive that Trainz is on. This may or may not cut down on the drive failure syndrome, but it does allow easy recovery. When one drive fails, you simply change which drive the machine will boot up on. This setup can be done through windows, although some motherboards also have a bios that allows mirroring. I am using the latter so far.
 
Biggest wind up for me is that the Vista install CD won't see SATA hard drives unless it has a special driver file. Of course it isn't on the Vista disc and has to be dug out from (of all places) your motherboard's support site. Once acquired, the preferred option for getting Vista to see this driver is - wait for it - via a floppy disc. I mean for goodness sake, who has even put a floppy drive in a PC during the last 5 years let alone find anywhere selling 3.5" discs? Allegedly it will work off a pen drive but I couldn't get that system to work or see the file.

In the end I had to hook up my old IDE drive via a SATA adapter gadget, somehow got Vista on there then cloned the drive over on to the HD I wanted as the primary.

With an upgrade to the main PC due later this year and a likely upgrade to Windows 7, I'm just hoping they cured this stupidity with W7.
 
Biggest wind up for me is that the Vista install CD won't see SATA hard drives unless it has a special driver file. Of course it isn't on the Vista disc and has to be dug out from (of all places) your motherboard's support site.


I've done countless Vista installs on more than a dozen desktops and laptops over the years but never run into anything like you describe. As a matter of fact I just reformatted a friends computer with Vista over the weekend, again no problems with Vista seeing the SATA hard drive.

The only time I've use a “special” driver was with setting up a RAID array by using the F-6 method, which is the same for any Windows OS I've used (XP, Vista or Windows 7).
 
With an upgrade to the main PC due later this year and a likely upgrade to Windows 7, I'm just hoping they cured this stupidity with W7.

W7 natively sees a lot of common SATA controllers by default, but even if it doesn't, they did fix this - they made it so that you can use USB memory sticks or CDs as well for schlepping the SATA driver to the install process.
 
W7 natively sees a lot of common SATA controllers by default, but even if it doesn't, they did fix this - they made it so that you can use USB memory sticks or CDs as well for schlepping the SATA driver to the install process.


Nothing new, the same can be said about XP/SP3 and Vista. The stand out advantage that Windows 7 has over the other two is much better SSD support.
 
Hi John,

I really feel for you! I have a dog also, and now, after reading your message, I firmly believe that dogs have started a revolution.

As for hard drive failures and corrupted data. I have had trains now for quite a while, starting with 2006, to 2010, and I noted that trainz does have a high HD access. Actually more so that most software. This access may be the cause of your crashes.

I have replaced 3 1T drives so far, and yet in the past prior to Trainz have run drives for 10 years without failure.

Since then I have finally decided to Mirror the drive that Trainz is on. This may or may not cut down on the drive failure syndrome, but it does allow easy recovery. When one drive fails, you simply change which drive the machine will boot up on. This setup can be done through windows, although some motherboards also have a bios that allows mirroring. I am using the latter so far.

You bring up a good point about the drive access. I was thinking after reading this, that perhaps we need server-class hardware instead of these cheaply made consumer-grade hard drives. The server-class hardware are better made for continuous drive access in systems that support databases, video streaming and other highly-intensive situations that push the hard drives beyond what they would be on a desktop system.

I've used various mirroring on high-end servers, but never on a desktop. This is something to consider for the future. The problem with mirroring and redundant drive setups is there is a lag between the read-writes as the drives are updated. This maybe inperceptive in high-end systems with large cache-drive controllers, but the regular desktop system may stutter more because the controllers don't have the large caching or the bus resources allocated to this type of operation.

John
 
I'm no guru on the subject, but wouldn't an SSD drive be a viable, if somewhat epensive solution to the problem? I would think that a consumer grade SSD would be cost competitive when compared to commercial grade server components.
 
I'm no guru on the subject, but wouldn't an SSD drive be a viable, if somewhat epensive solution to the problem? I would think that a consumer grade SSD would be cost competitive when compared to commercial grade server components.

I thought so too. I would say give them another 2 or 3 years to settle down. Right now they cost as much as an old 40mb drive did when they first came out, and are just about the equivelent size!

John
 
In 1990, a 40MB Seagate cost $375.00, or about the same as a rather small SSD drive does today.

John

I need to look to see if I still have mine. Still have a working 286 mobo. Sometimes I want to put it all together and fire it up for old time's sake.
 
My Amiga would think that was 'Nirvana' when it was first built, it now has a 200Gb HD & thinks it's in 7th heaven. :D
I know it's off topic (sorry), but what version OS are you running?

As Mac Trainz has been announced it's now time to push for Amiga Trainz. ;)
 
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