Tag: Windows

Thursday

Stuck a new hard drive in my cousin's computer, biked on up to Changing Hands to pick up my copy of Circle of Enemies, grabbed a bite of dinner with my grandparents. A little bit of the ol' job search in there, plus some work on a couple of projects I'll probably talk about a little later. (And my uncle grabbed me a copy of Dragon Quest 6 as thanks for the computer work; on the list it goes.)

Tomorrow: Uncle Garth's military funeral and maybe a birthday lunch for Grandpa if he's feeling up to it.

Something weird about my cousin's laptop: the trackpad didn't work properly. At boot the left mouse click behaved like a right-click; on plugging in an external mouse, the external mouse would exhibit the same problem for several seconds -- and then it would correct itself, and both the external mouse and the trackpad would left-click correctly. (But only the external mouse would right-click correctly -- I never got the right-click on the trackpad to work at all.)

Drivers were up-to-date (and I tried uninstalling and reinstalling them) and the Toshiba Value-Add software was installed. Any other Toshiba users have this problem?

Bloat

Tonight I wanted to print something.

For some fucking reason, this required me to download a 140MB "driver file" that appears to be composed primarily of videos, one of which tells me how to use my printer and the other is just a fucking animated HP logo.

In my personal and professional opinion, shit like that is completely inexcusable. There is no fucking reason why I should have to download 138MB of crap just so I can get at the 2MB driver file.

At least there was a feedback form at the bottom of the page. I filled it out! It was a lot like this post but with less cursing. (Although I did tell them that I am offended "as a programmer, as a customer, and as a guy with SHIT TO DO.")

Increased processing power and widespread high-speed Internet has made programmers lazy. (Though in the programmers' defense, this particular little call has "marketing department" written all over it.) On the plus side, the increasing prevalence of smartphones is forcing developers to think about smaller footprints, both in system requirements and bandwidth consumption. But unfortunately that's probably not going to convince anybody to make Windows device drivers smaller.

More Random Thoughts

Got an E-Mail about a Win7 update needs doin'. Only a four-day job but it'd still be nice to get.

Dizzy again today. It had been awhile. Don't know what caused it; did not like it.

Those Threadless shirts came in, and so far they seem like quality merchandise! I am happy with them. The Groupon deal still appears to be going on; it's worth checking out. (Though I now find that both shirts have been marked down to about the price I paid with the coupon since I ordered -- oh well, it happens.)

Ate dinner at Cornish Pasty. Good food, good beer.

Arrow has turned out to be a surprisingly good show, but man the dialogue on tonight's was overwrought. Geoff Johns? Oh.

Hosiery: The Re-Brokening

Welp, broke my computer again, sort of.

See, I've confirmed that the instability I've been experiencing with the ol' OSX boot is definitely due to booting it from GRUB; it works fine from EFI.

So I decided I'd give Chameleon another shot -- maybe another bootloader would be more stable? Worth a try, right?

'Cept I can't get Chameleon to work this time, and it fucked GRUB up so it won't boot anymore either. (Edit to add: Apparently an MBR disk can't have more than one bootable partition? Guess it's been awhile since I took that A+ test. So okay, it's easy enough to get GRUB working again, but it doesn't help me get Chameleon working.)

The good news is that Chameleon boots just fine from CD, so I can still boot OpenSUSE that way.

The bad news is that, for some damn reason, holding down "C" to boot from CD doesn't work anymore on my Mac, so I've had to stick the damn helper card back in to access the boot menu by holding down Option when I power up.

(The other bad news is that AVG Free decided to flag fucking rundll32.exe as a virus and delete it, but Win8 must have restored it automatically because it worked okay on a reboot. But that's all the Win8 I did today.)

Anyway. Hoping I can get this damn mess fixed tomorrow. Because I've got better shit to do than keep fucking around with bootloaders.

TestDisk

I guess I was overdue for doing something monumentally stupid and sloppy, because Friday night I went to format an external 1TB hard drive and accidentally formatted my internal one instead -- the one with Windows on it.

Now, after a moment's panic, I realized that I didn't have anything vital and irreplaceable on there -- I had backups of my resume, my password wallet, things like that. I hadn't backed up my financial spreadsheets or work search log in a couple weeks, but I could reconstruct those if I absolutely had to from my bank statements and E-Mails. And I had a Mass Effect 2 save that was maybe an hour farther along than my backup.

So, nothing life-or-death. But I'd still just as soon not have to take the time to reinstall Win7, reinstall Win8, reconstruct my spreadsheets, and replay that last hour of ME2 if I could avoid it. And I knew it was just a quick format, so my data should all still be intact on the drive -- it was just a matter of getting to it.

I was booted to OSX at the time, and the first piece of recovery software I found was EaseUS. It was a free trial for a $90 piece of software. Now, I knew going in that there was no way my lost data was worth $90 to me, but I figured I'd see how far I'd get with it.

Not fucking very.

You'd think a trial for a $90 piece of software would be designed to make you think the software was worth $90. Instead the fucker just kept hanging -- I might, might get as far as it displaying all my disks and partitions, but after that (or, just as frequently, before that) it would just lock up, static unresponsive window, Spinning Beach Ball of Death, all that shit.

So then I stumbled upon TestDisk. I missed the part where it said there was an OSX version, so I rebooted to Linux to see if I could install it.

And found that my OpenSUSE boot had somehow become hosed too. (I would later find out that this was not a coincidence and that OpenSUSE actually goes into Emergency Boot Mode if it fails to load a filesystem in its fstab. I did not consider this at the time because (1) I was very tired and (2) Linux failing to boot because it can't mount a Windows drive is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard.)

But fortunately I still have my old Kubuntu drive onhand, and it was not only able to boot, but it already had TestDisk installed, with no worrying about having to fuck with repos. I think it may even be part of the basic Ubuntu installation.

Now, there's a lovely step-by-step guide at the TestDisk site called Recovery of Reformatted Partition.

The bad news: I spent yesterday trying to recover the drive and never did get it to work, and I'm finally giving up the ghost because it's just not worth fucking with it any longer. But I figured I'd put this up here just in case you have better luck with it than I did. I had a hard time, in my initial search, finding a good listing of Linux software to use to try and recover an NTFS partition that has accidentally been reformatted. Maybe somebody will stumble across this page in a similar search someday, and find TestDisk as a result.

Again, it didn't work for me -- but it looks like a solid piece of software, and it's worth a shot. (Unlike EaseUS, which is a piece of crap you should not waste your time with.) Good luck.

Triple-Booting a Mac Pro: Legacy Edition

Well, it's been a pretty exasperating few days, but I've successfully gotten my old (2006/1,1) Mac Pro set up to triple boot Lion (with a 64-bit kernel), OpenSUSE 12.2, and the Windows 8 Release Preview.

First, I set up Lion. I followed Jabbawok's Mountain Lion guide exactly, with one exception: since I was installing Regular Lion and not Mountain Lion, I didn't need to alter OSInstall.mpkg to skip the motherboard check. (As far as drive bays: I put the installer hard drive in bay 1 and the Lion drive in bay 2.)

After this I found that I could only get the 64-bit kernel if I used Chameleon's flag for Safe Mode (-x). Otherwise I got a blank gray screen on my helper card and a white screen with a frozen mouse pointer on my main card. This fixed itself once I yanked the helper card -- but I'll get to that in a minute. If you've got a helper card and you're following this guide, don't remove it until you've got all 3 OS's installed and get a nice clean GRUB menu when you boot. (Or a stupid-looking light-gray-on-bright-green GRUB menu, as the case may be.)

Anyway, after setting up Lion, I set up Boot Camp and tried to install Win8 (on a drive in Bay 3). I got the ol' "Select CD-ROM Boot Type" prompt where everything froze and failed to recognize any input.

I'd dealt with this years ago when I first set up Windows 7; I had to bootstrap my install disc. I decided I would just as soon not fuck with that procedure ever again, so instead of bootstrapping Win8, I used my already-bootstrapped Win7 disc to install Win7 and then upgraded to the Win8 preview from there.

And then I installed OpenSUSE (over the Lion installer partition in bay 1).

The OpenSUSE install DVD gave me the same "Select CD-ROM Boot Type" prompt freeze, so I tried the OpenSUSE KDE LiveCD -- that one worked just fine.

And after I'd installed OpenSUSE, I found that my computer had set itself up to automatically boot straight to the GRUB boot prompt. And, better still -- it had correctly set up Windows and both 32- and 64-bit kernel boots for OSX. Chameleon was totally redundant and unnecessary by this point.

The trouble? GRUB had the same problem Chameleon had: OSX would lock on boot unless I ran it in safe mode.

So that's when I popped out the helper card.

(Don't know what a helper card is? Then you don't need to know about it. But the gist is this: my Mac Pro came with a GeForce 7300GT graphics card. Last year I upgraded to a GTX 570. While current versions of OSX do recognize the GTX 570, the EFI boot firmware does not -- so I needed to leave the 7300GT plugged in to see the boot menu.)

Once I popped the 7300GT, everything worked great -- the GRUB menu came up, and booted any of the 3 OS's without any trouble. Success!


Or at least, success until earlier today when something got fucked up and broke everything and I spent my entire day trying to fix it. Ultimately it appears to have been a weird fluke -- I think my partition table got corrupted somehow, because I found that even a format/reinstall didn't fix the problem; I had to actually repartition (the Chameleon/OpenSUSE drive) to get it working again.

So that sucked. And is the second time in two days I found myself chasing down help pages for the last line of a boot log only to find it had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual problem I was having. What a damn bummer.

The upshot, though, is that I've got a 64-bit kernel working in OSX, which should let me set up the RAIDZ array I wanted to put together for my grandmother's home movies.

And last night I played Mass Effect 2 for an hour or so without getting a BSOD. Could be just a coincidence, but I'm hoping that removing the helper card and booting from GRUB instead of EFI fixed the constant crashes I'd been having before.

Next I'll try it under WINE -- maybe I won't have to reboot to Windows at all anymore.


As for how I feel about Macs, Windows 8, and OpenSUSE...well, those are all ripe topics for another day.

Reinstallating

Decided that, now that I've got more free time, I may as well give my computer a clean install of everything.

For OSX: Attempting to install Chameleon Bootloader so I can use a 64-bit kernel.

For Windows: Trying out the Win8 Release Preview.

For Linux: Switching to OpenSUSE.

So far it's been rocky. Something's not quite right with Chameleon and I can only boot OSX in 64-bit mode if I do it in safe mode. Haven't been able to determine where the problem is, as the last few lines of verbose boot happen whether it's in safe mode or not. If it's not in safe mode I get a freeze on a white screen, with mouse pointer visible. While I'm considering trying to upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion to see if that fixes the problem, I've seen people report similar issues in ML and I wouldn't want to spend $20 on discovering I still have the same problem. (Plus if I switch to ML I won't be able to fall back to a regular, non-Chameleon EFI boot like I can with Lion.)

Win8 -- well, it's set up. The parts that look the way they're supposed to look pretty damn good; the icons, tiles, and fonts are all really attractive. A lot of legacy stuff -- like program installers -- looks like blurry hell, but I'll give MS the benefit of the doubt and suggest that maybe that's because I'm using a beta. Not sold on the Start Screen yet, the shit that's moved is not easy to find, and switching between Metro and Oldschool-Style programs is unintuitive as fuck.

As for OpenSUSE, well, haven't had time to install it yet. Stay tuned.

What Now?

So today I got the old "Well, the project's almost over and we don't know what that means for you" talk.

As per usual, if it were up to the discretion of people I have actually met, I'd have the job. But, as per usual, I am at the mercy of west-coast bean counters.

The thing about that: when you complete a project weeks ahead of schedule, the people who have actually met you think, "Hey, maybe we should keep this guy around." But the bean counters tend to think, "Oh good, that means we can cut him loose that much sooner." Here's hoping the people who value me win the argument for a change.

Apparently I've got, at the very least, two weeks left. Which could mean I become unemployed just in time for my thirtieth birthday. I don't think it'll be that soon, but man that would be a fun little extra coincidence.

So it goes. I'm sanguine, I guess. I'd like to keep my job -- it's a good gig, it pays fairly, I'm settled and I like the people I'm working with -- but you know, if I'm forced into another change of scenery, I'll make the best of that too.

If nothing else, there are plenty of companies that could still use a guy who can handle a Windows 7 migration.

Boxes are Hard.

It's vexed me for years and years that end users seem unable to comprehend very simple things like what a Web browser is, the difference between Windows and Office, and how to come up with effective search terms to type into Google.

In more recent years, I have come to understand that, for some of these people, simply putting a thing in a box and affixing a label to it is a nigh-impossible process.

Today I received a desktop computer that was just thrown into a box with no padding whatsoever -- a current model and redeployable (well, maybe not anymore) -- and an old, past-end-of-life laptop packed inside of multiple boxes and wrapped in layer after layer of bubble wrap with tape. The former shipped from out-of-state, while the latter came from an office two blocks away from mine. Would be nice if they could work out some sort of happy medium.

Two weeks ago I missed a day of work with a migraine. The day after that I scrambled and played catchup and shipped two days' worth of computers in one day. Turnaround time from shipping a new computer to receiving the old one is right about two weeks, so today I was hit with two days' worth of returns in one day.

And okay, I've spent enough of this post complaining about stupid users that I'll take a moment and acknowledge my own stupid fuckup of the day.

I had a giant pile of boxes in front of me and a small pile of outbound machines, and I started to stress out about it a little. And I made a mistake.

I took a break from processing returns to ship a machine out, and I got my wires crossed and started going through the return process. I deleted a user's old computer and its access group from ActiveDirectory, before shipping her replacement. And since I don't have access to fix that, I had to ask my coworker to take care of it.

It's about that time I decided I should probably take some deep breaths and try to relax before doing anything else -- not just for fear of more sloppy mistakes, but because if I'm not careful I'll give myself another migraine, and then I'll just be going through this same song and dance again in a couple weeks.

Still opted not to take a break right away -- because that just means more crap I gotta do tomorrow -- but I slowed down a bit. Got through maybe half the stack, finally got enough facefuls of dust from old Dells that I decided to call it quits for the day.

So, more to do tomorrow. But I guess that's the closest thing a temp ever gets to job security.

PC Gamer's Dilemma

Well, I finally got me an Xbox 360.

It was free. My fiancée got a new computer with one of those student "comes with a free Xbox" deals.

Here's the thing: I've got a pretty solid gaming rig. And another pretty solid media rig. So I haven't felt much need for Xboxin' up to this point.

The advantages and drawbacks of PC gaming are pretty well-documented. A PC can support crazy high-end hardware, but while the games are cheaper the gear is more expensive and fiddly and there's a whole lot that can go wrong.

Me, I'm something like a niche of a niche of a niche of a niche -- I run Linux on a Mac Pro as my primary OS and keep Windows around for gaming.

This is pretty cool when it works. But here's the thing: even a good Apple makes for a pretty crummy gaming system.

Last year I bought a pretty high-end Nvidia card. ATI has better Mac support, but I've had nothing but headaches trying to get ATI cards working with Linux. Nvidia's always run smoother for me -- galling considering their total lack of cooperation with Linux and the open-source community, but true.

But it's not an officially-supported card. It works under OSX (as of 10.7.3) but it's not entirely reliable under Windows -- when it gets taxed too heavily, I get a bluescreen.

It happened a few times when I played through Witcher 2, but, perversely, it's given me more trouble on Mass Effect 2 -- a game I had no trouble playing through with all the settings maxed out on a lower-end (but officially-Apple-supported) ATI card.

I thought it might be a heating problem but it occurs, consistently, even when I crank up all my system fans with third-party software.

The game worked fine up until Omega, and then started BSoDing randomly. I managed to recruit Garrus in-between crashes, but by the time it came around to Mordin's quest I couldn't get past loading the corridor.

I could just try some other missions, but seriously, you want me to put off getting Mordin? Hell no.

I've found, from searching, that this appears to be a fairly common problem with ME2, even among people not running eccentric hardware configurations such as mine. And I've found a few suggested fixes, but none have worked for me.

I've tried running the game under WINE on both OSX and Ubuntu. Under OSX it plods (I suspect my helper card may be to blame; maybe I'll try disabling it to make sure my higher-end card is the only one the system's putting a load on); under Ubuntu it runs fine up until the menu screen but then doesn't respond to mouse clicks or keystrokes (other than system stuff like Alt-Tab or Alt-F4). I haven't turned up any other reports of this same problem, so I can't find a fix -- maybe one of these days I'll try a full clean install and see if it still does it. Nuke my WINE settings too if I have to. (Or maybe I could set it up on my fiancée's new computer...)

Needless to say, I haven't tried Mass Effect 3 yet.

And that's before we get into all the DRM bullshit plaguing the PC platform.

Never played Batman: Arkham Asylum, largely because of the SecuROM/GFWL/Steamworks Katamari of Sucktitude. Similarly, I gave Dragon Age 2 a miss once I heard reports of people unable to authenticate their legally-purchased games because they'd been banned from BioWare's forums for saying mean things about EA. (Which obviously totally disproves that EA deserves to be called names.)

It's a great damn time to be a PC gamer for a lot of reasons -- a huge indie scene supported by the likes of Steam and the Humble Indie Bundle, with both pushing more gaming on OSX and even Linux -- but it's a lousy time for other reasons.

Anyway. Now I've got an Xbox. All else being equal, I still prefer to play games on the PC, but for cases where the Xbox has less restrictive DRM (like Arkham Asylum) or titles that aren't available on PC (like Red Dead Redemption) or just shit I can get for under five bucks (like a used copy of Gears of War I just picked up), well, it's kinda cool to have one.


Playing: Batman: Arkham Asylum.