Hardware update
Pah. XP installs. and SATA. I hates them, I does.
A few weeks back, I bought a second gigabyte of RAM for my gaming PC. I'd carefully checked the spec, and the components I'd ordered when I built it. 2 Gig capacity, 1 Gig ordered.
And was a bit suprised when I opened the case, and foudn both memory slots full. And they weren't full with 512Meg memory (making 1 Gig total). Nope, both had 1 Gig in already. Bah! At some point in the past, I'd already upgraded it. So now I had 1 Gig of spare RAM. At 34 quid from the nice chap at Sinoco, it wasn't the end of the world.
Until I got around to opening the machine in the lounge. This (I checked!) had only 1 gig in it, with a 2 Gig capacity. Unfortunately, this one did have two sticks of half Gig RAM. So I wasn't getting a full Gig upgrade, but replacing one. Shucks.
And then the machine rebooted itself halfway through watching an episode of Dexter.
A preliminary investigation seemed to indicate that the error messages (when Windows came back up) indicated a fault on the NTFS partition. Damn.
Fortunately, there's very little actually on that machine: all the media that it plays is stored elsewhere in the house. So reinstalling looked like a viable option. It's been a a bit very slow booting for a while.
XP doesn't like installing onto SATA disks. It would happily install, reboot, and then complain that it couldn't find an operating system.
Before the geeks amongst you say it: Ubuntu doesn't like booting on that machine. I don't actually know what the problem is, but I think it's ending up at a screen resolution that my TV can't display. So I can eventually get a command line prompt, but not enough to do a proper install, which would add a boot manager to sort things out. (Yes, I could figure it out. But this was only supposed to be a quick reinstall).
So... install onto an old PATA drive I've got, and then ghost it across.
Success! For about 45 minutes. Then spontaneous reboots. Plus various messages telling me:Windows File Protection
Files that are required for Windows to run properly have been replaced by unrecognized versions. To maintain system stability, Windows must restore the original versions of these files. Insert your product CD-ROM now.
So... is the problem the memory? The NTFS file system? The SATA drive? The Nvidia Software IDE drivers (install at your own risk?)
Long story short: I got it working again last night, about 7pm, having found out that FAT32 only supports 128 Gig partitions. Which is why the ghosting was failing. And so forth.
But now it's happy, with the original memory back in place.
Only took me 10 days (total) to reinstall bloody XP.
A few weeks back, I bought a second gigabyte of RAM for my gaming PC. I'd carefully checked the spec, and the components I'd ordered when I built it. 2 Gig capacity, 1 Gig ordered.
And was a bit suprised when I opened the case, and foudn both memory slots full. And they weren't full with 512Meg memory (making 1 Gig total). Nope, both had 1 Gig in already. Bah! At some point in the past, I'd already upgraded it. So now I had 1 Gig of spare RAM. At 34 quid from the nice chap at Sinoco, it wasn't the end of the world.
Until I got around to opening the machine in the lounge. This (I checked!) had only 1 gig in it, with a 2 Gig capacity. Unfortunately, this one did have two sticks of half Gig RAM. So I wasn't getting a full Gig upgrade, but replacing one. Shucks.
And then the machine rebooted itself halfway through watching an episode of Dexter.
A preliminary investigation seemed to indicate that the error messages (when Windows came back up) indicated a fault on the NTFS partition. Damn.
Fortunately, there's very little actually on that machine: all the media that it plays is stored elsewhere in the house. So reinstalling looked like a viable option. It's been a a bit very slow booting for a while.
XP doesn't like installing onto SATA disks. It would happily install, reboot, and then complain that it couldn't find an operating system.
Before the geeks amongst you say it: Ubuntu doesn't like booting on that machine. I don't actually know what the problem is, but I think it's ending up at a screen resolution that my TV can't display. So I can eventually get a command line prompt, but not enough to do a proper install, which would add a boot manager to sort things out. (Yes, I could figure it out. But this was only supposed to be a quick reinstall).
So... install onto an old PATA drive I've got, and then ghost it across.
Success! For about 45 minutes. Then spontaneous reboots. Plus various messages telling me:Windows File Protection
Files that are required for Windows to run properly have been replaced by unrecognized versions. To maintain system stability, Windows must restore the original versions of these files. Insert your product CD-ROM now.
So... is the problem the memory? The NTFS file system? The SATA drive? The Nvidia Software IDE drivers (install at your own risk?)
Long story short: I got it working again last night, about 7pm, having found out that FAT32 only supports 128 Gig partitions. Which is why the ghosting was failing. And so forth.
But now it's happy, with the original memory back in place.
Only took me 10 days (total) to reinstall bloody XP.