Hi all, The other night (well, actually day turned into night) I was going to help an in-law install a video card and migrate a windows 98 se system to a larger hard disk drive. I was told that everything was working fine, it just needed a better video card to play a new(ish) game. So, I made some ghost boot floppies and a backup of my win98se install cdrom (they had their manual with the license but couldn't find their cdrom) and headed over. The computer was working fine, right? That's where the fun starts, and I was hoping for some feedback as to the likely cause of the problems I'm about to describe. I didn't bring my tools with me to test things because everything was working...riiiiiight.... So, I can't fit both drives in at once because the Gigabyte micro ATX motherboard (in a full size ATX case with 300W Auriga power supply) doesn't allow enough room to fit a drive in the second hard drive bay without removing the P4 2.4GHz CPU (the shop they went to and bought the new hard drive from said it would be fine, but they obviously didn't try a test fit). So I removed the old drive and set it up on a static bag outside the case as master on IDE 1 after installing the new drive as master on IDE 2 (I disconnected the cdrw and dvdrom drives). All set to ghost, right? The floppy doesn't see boot media. I connect up another spare demonstrably working floppy on the same power connector and floppy cable (same spot), resulting in the same error. So, maybe the power supply is messed up or the floppy controller on the motherboard is gone or there's a problem with the floppy ribbon. They never use the floppy, so they didn't know of the problem. So I reconnect the optical drives and put the hard drives on the same channel, boot into win98se, and use the Western Digital clone utility from a cdr I brought along to clone C: to D: and everything goes fine, with the program reporting a successful clone and that the 7 files it did not copy over would be replaced by the operating system (files such as cookies.txt and the like). I disconnect the old drive, put the new drive as master, and try and reboot. The system POSTs but doesn't boot, just hanging right before it should go to win98se. Now I'm getting a little frustrated, so we've got a backup copy of my win98se and the in-law's license for his win98se, and the next step we decided on was a clean install. Unfortunately the system would freeze after asking if we wanted to boot from the cdrom or the hard drive with the backup copy of win98se in the old dvdrom. In the old cdrw drive it doesn't even get this far, complaining of not liking the boot media. A second backup of win98 (original) is tried in both drives and the results are worse with neither drive 'seeing' the cd. Booting into win98se from the original drive works fine, and again the drives can read and transfer data from all cdrs. Wondering about the PSU, I put all the devices on the same branch of power connectors from the PSU (there are two branches). Now even the floppy works! I'm able to do a successful clone with ghost (after disconnecting the optical drives and putting the old drive as master on IDE 1 and the new drive as master on IDE 2, just like I had set originally) and the system boots into win98se. Everything is working (beyond it identifying an unknown device in the system devices list as well as a conflict with the haupage TV tuner card and a driver problem with the modem wave device) and so I install the new video card and the ATi drivers. Everything works. We install his new game, and it works on the new card where it wouldn't with the old card. I even put the floppy back onto the original branch of the PSU that it was on at the start (leaving the other drives alone) and now the floppy works again and will boot with several different boot floppies where at the beginning it wouldn't see any! I'm wondering what the hell happened? Is this a flaky old PSU getting ready to die? I kept having to try and retry things and sometimes they'd work, sometimes they wouldn't, and in the end they were working when an hour before they were dead or functioning improperly. I didn't have my tools or backup hardware to test these things, and it was a real hassle. It may be working now, but I'd really like some input as to what may be the problem or problems with this system, as most of the trouble was well outside of windows so I can't blame it on a user screwing up the OS. Cheers, Ari -- spammage trappage: replace fishies_ with yahoo I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor: http://www.abmdr.org.au/ http://www.marrow.org/
I was aware of that beforehand and made sure the jumpers were configured properly on all drives throughout the 'ordeal' Ari -- spammage trappage: replace fishies_ with yahoo I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor: http://www.abmdr.org.au/ http://www.marrow.org/
heck for me this is normal having issues. *lol* i work with ancient hardware. i often tell the people i do it free for that they should go sacrifice a goat and pray for the processes success at whatever altar they worship at. as they are africans they love the sense of humor. if a day comes along where a system upgrade just works i mark it down as a miracle. *lol*
What is your reference for this? Anti static materials are supposed to be non conductive to prevent just the sort of things you're worried about. -- spammage trappage: replace fishies_ with yahoo I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor: http://www.abmdr.org.au/ http://www.marrow.org/
The new drive was never on the bag, though, only the old drive which never missed a beat (neither did the new drive once the ghosting was finished). It also doesn't explain the floppy drive and other weirdness when no connected drives were on the bag (which was most of the time that I was fartsing around, I just didn't list every last thing I did during the hours of wanting to bash the PC with a hammer as my original post was already long). I've never heard that the static bags were conductive, though. I was under the impression that they're quite the opposite to prevent charge reaching the materials that they contain. Do you have a reference for this? Like something general that might point out other interesting tidbits that would be good for me to know? dg also pointed this out in this thread. Ari -- spammage trappage: replace fishies_ with yahoo I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor: http://www.abmdr.org.au/ http://www.marrow.org/
I think antistatic material is supposed to be conductive to keep all points at the same voltage. It would also help dissipate static electricity arriving at any one point. A very bright high school student said something like that to me once, that he didn't understand why humidity would help dissipate static electricity. Humidity (water vapor) is conductive.
I'm still hoping someone can give me a site that has this sort of information and other related information so that I can do some reading and avoid making these types of errors. I've seen static bags used in case-mods and in industry in exactly the way I was using it (but it was only in use for a small number of the problems, and generally there weren't problems when it was in use in this case), but that doesn't mean that 'just because everyone else is doing it' that it's the right thing. -- spammage trappage: replace fishies_ with yahoo I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor: http://www.abmdr.org.au/ http://www.marrow.org/
David Maynard wrote: Nope, motherboard was in the case and properly installed. The only thing I did with that was reset to failsafe defaults after the problems started and change the boot order sometimes. Thanks, I'll have a read through! -- spammage trappage: replace fishies_ with yahoo I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor: http://www.abmdr.org.au/ http://www.marrow.org/
