Ayam Alife!

Been a long while since I posted .. Have been busy with work and stuff. Had a traumatic weekend when I went home .. Flipped on Resurrection, and she couldn't boot! Gah! She couldn't even hit bios. Kept rebooting. :S

Started pulling stuff out and trying to boot. Finally pulled out the mobo and tried to boot... no dice. *severely traumatised*

Decided to bring in the mobo the next day to RMA... SIGH.

Met R and went down to SLS to RMA the mobo, he went to the office while I went to SLS. Then when I got there, the dude said actually mobo must/should RMA at the distributor, otherwise dunno when they will fix (duh?) But good thing the distributor was coming down in the afternoon so he could bring another one for me to change.

So went back to the office and did some work, closed some bugs, added some bug notes while waiting.

Finally at long last, I got my new mobo and went home to hook her up. Before I encased her into Resurrection's metal shell, I tested her to make sure that she could boot. You know, the good ol' insert the screw driver in a specific locations. Hooked her up and lugged the heavy metal casing back. Powered her on and lo Windows finally started.

All was fine and dandy until she started crashing really badly.

It would be like *chat on msn* *hear some ... dropping sound* and Resurrection will chug to a halt. She was even starting to hang at chkdsk -_-;; at that point, I was reaching @($&*@*(!! state. WTF was happening?!? Then errors like "unknown hard error" started popping up.

....

Severely traumatised, I formed several conclusions
1: Most obvious, hdd xX
2: The new mobo has a new revision of the ACHI driver, it could be that.

So I decided to reinstall windows.

...

Windows setup takes like a few gazillion years to load -_-. Upon startup, it loads like fitty billion drivers which you've never EVER seen before. QLogic? Nani? SCSI? Just load the ones I need lah, the rest just load on demand! <_<

At first I decided to be lazy and do a repair, after grinding through a yellow progress bar which purports to be "checking your disk", it ended with a "Setup has repair errors in your disk, press F3 to restart" message. Which I dutifully did (not that you have much of a choice)

After getting into setup .. again .. zzz... I tried to repair again, it went through the yellow progress bar, and ended with a "Setup has detected that your drive is corrupted and blah, Setup cannot continue" -_-

So I decided (was just banging my head against a wall) to reinstall windows clean

After grinding through setup again (more times than mentioned!), I finally reached the install windows screen. Selected that I want - install windows in c, delete current windows... It did the Yellow Progress Bar (AGAIN!) and deleted my windows :O zomg! .. Then it *gasp* started to install windows .........

However ...... at driver.cab, it suddenly bailed on me with this message "Setup cannot copy driver.cab from the cd.. make sure blah blah file there blah" .. I was fainting. Don't tell me my CD died too!? .. I tried both Xps that I had but no dice, finally had no choice but to reboot ....

.. And grind through setup .. again.

This time it couldn't even detect my primary disk -_-

Went through setup ......... again.

Detected C. D and E (which were separate partitions on the same physical disk) were listed as UNKNOWN.

Nonetheless, tried to install windows into C. At 97% of the Yellow Progress Bar, it bailed on me again. This time it was d3d8.dll which couldn't be found.

After some teeth gnashing (this time it's pretty apparent that it's not media fault)..

Went through setup ......... yet again.

This time it managed to detect all my partitions, and installed ......

It even managed to boot into the GUI part of the installation! Zomg!

... Tried to install East Asian language, halfway through the grinding .. it died.

I've nv seen Setup @ GUI side bail so spectacularly before, but it did. I finally did the wise thing and gave up.

Went and got a new harddisk, a Hitachi Deathstar 500GB the next day. Installed everything fine.

However, something odd happened when I plugged in my old primary disk (which is a WD 320GB) to save my data. My ACHI bios couldn't detect my Deathstar! :O But it managed to detect my WD fine. .. -_- After clearing CMOS, it finally detected both drives and booted. Once in windows, I quickly arranged for my sweet sweet data to escape into the Ark. (Maybe I should rename one of my partitions that). It was a painful journey, imagine the torrential rain, pouring down into the waterlogged muddy land, with your data, gray with mud, struggling to make it across. The ones who had gone over screaming for their companions to get to safety. After several breakages in connection (which brought down the file transfer but not windows, thankfully), the pertinent data managed to get Saved. Finally. The rest had to be jettisoned.

You'd think all would be well at this point, but strangely .. it seems that after this, the mobo's starting to have difficulty in detecting my Deathstar -_-, my 250 Hitachi is still reliably detected -_-.

At this point I decided (not very wisely) to flash the bios of my mobo, to hopefully fix this "bug". This is my first and last time flashing a gigabyte board. The windows flashing application is extremely poorly written. There's some threading issues around. When it's making the ftp connection to download the new bios, the gui hangs.. -_-; When it's doing the MOST IMPORTANT job (the sole reason for its existence!), the GUI hung. You know how traumatic that is!? Updating the bios of your mobo's one of the most :S things to do, pull the plug, windows hang .. and it's dead.

So finally, thankfully, the application didn't die, and I rebooted. Instead of a friendly bios screen, this screen appeared.

Scanning BIOS from Harddisk . . .

Nani?! The power button started winking at me at this point. After sitting around for a moment waiting for THINGS to happen, I decided to just restart the damn thing. When she restarted (fingers crossed!) she went into the Dual Bios (which gigabyte always trumpets about) selection screen and said "Updating bios" ... .... .. and completed.

Hurrah?

Well.

I booted into windows, the second before the Welcome screen was to appear, Resurrection did a hard reset. THEN windows booted up perfectly. -_-

Seriously!?

Neither did the flash fix my "can't detect Deathstar 500" problem too.

So now I have 2 problems, unreliable detection of Primary Deathstar and 2 boots to get into windows.

Just (hopefully) fixed the first problem. My mobo has 2 raid/IDE controllers, the ICH8R and the Gigabyte one. Previously I've been using the ICH8R, so now I've plugged both my drives to the Gigabyte controller (note to self, when I reinstall windows I'll have to plug them back to ICH8R, cos that's the one I have drivers for.. I could try getting the gigabyte ones I guess ..... sigh)

So far so good. Detection's much faster on the Gigabyte controller than ICH8R.

However, my windows still has the double booting problem -_- Not sure how to fix it. Not really keen to reinstall windows.

On the bright side, at least it's ... automated.............?

GAH!


/wail T_T