Tech Support Post Mortem

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PC Tech

Hopefully I have it all licked now.     System issues with the new PC build were :

1. There were no SATA Data Cables.     They should have been in there with the motherboard.   I bought some to solve this one, however :
2. Could not connect all three drives – DVD, SSD, HDD.     Careful connecting and reconnecting of drives results in discovering only one cable works with the DVD drive.   No idea why that should be so, but it is very consistent.   Problem solved.
3. SSD will not permit Windows 7 to be installed.    The true experts at Sevenforums.com are even stumped.    It’s probably something like the size of the drive (500 megs) therefore exceeding some obscure limit.
4. Using Hybrid Sleep, I would sleep the computer before going to bed.     Every single day I’d try to wake it, but it’s had a crash of some type overnight.
5. Leaving the PC 100% on (only physically powering off the monitor) also results in the same crash.
6. Perhaps this is a service pack issue.    Install SP1 to try and troubleshoot.
7. Wake up Saturday morning to find the graphics card has failed.     Fight and fight with the system before finally figuring it out – it only boots consistently with the MSI card out.     Next time I think I’ll just remove the graphics card first; I have a miserably basic Geforce 8800 GS that barely plays games, but is great for troubleshooting.
8. Discover the MSI card claims to need 500W.   I bought a 450W PSU.     Replacing with a 750W power supply results in the same errors, but I keep it anyway because of all the build issues.
9. You have to watch out for Newegg nowadays.    They used to be a no-hassle shop, but those days seem to be over.    15% restocking fees and unreturnable items are not fun in the slightest.     What really chaps my hide is the stupid SSD.      What good is it if the OS isn’t installed ?
10. With the defective MSI card removed, the PC boots successfully.   Now, what exactly is the problem with sleep?      Disabled Hybrid Sleep and the PC sleeps OK, but it behaves weird.     I can wake it up, and I know it’s awake because the fans spin and the HDD is grinding away.   But the screen stays black.     Well somehow, the monitor I have does not recognize that Windows is back on.   Powering it off and on will remove the black screen and finish waking the PC.

I am not sure I’m going to build my next PC; I’m getting too old for this shit.      I have kids and a wife who do not take well to the process of troubleshooting, and the taking up of 40 hours + of obsessive determination to make things work takes its toll on the family.

Time to process RMA’s and play some games.

Troubleshooting For ….. Life ?

Tags

PC Tech, World of Tanks

I had a good week with the new PC.   Got things set up and played around with various tools.

This looks awesome.

World of Tanks runs with all the graphics options set to high, and looks amazing.     I’ve been playing many matches and I find it fun again – the main drag on the game is the dearth of HD skins available which makes it much less fun to see an enemy (or friendly) tank in the game.

Libreoffice is working fine instead of MS Office for a home install.   I have a good amount of work compatibility, and I don’t use any of the recent features they’ve installed in the thing anyway.     100% Free doesn’t hurt either.    Calc is keeping my budget just fine, and Writer works for opening and (reading or printing) word docs.

There’s one issue I’m still trying to figure out.      You can put a Windows 7 PC in sleep mode, and it should wake up later.     I have managed to get sleep mode “working” on the computer, in that I tested it, it works, no problem, as long as I just leave it alone for 10 minutes or so.      But my usual method is to leave it in sleep mode when at work or overnight.

The PC will always have crashed and restarted if I do this.

OK – what could be the trouble ?      Service Pack 1 is an obvious first step, so I broke down and tried to install it yesterday.    It all went without a hitch, then I slept the computer last night and couldn’t get it to boot outside of safe mode this morning.   Instant panic.    I tried many things, and nothing worked.   I resigned myself to reinstall Windows one more time, after being certain that the problem must be SP1.

As a first step to reinstalling windows, I disabled Secure Boot within the BIOS and found that it managed to boot.    Hooray !     My sense is that whatever is going wrong in sleep mode, is outside of Windows – Hardware issue, and perhaps BIOS.     I guess I’ll keep putting it to sleep and see if “Secure Boot Disabled” does the trick.

 

Battle Of The SSD vs Win 7. SSD loses.

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PC Tech

Hmmm.  I cannot get the partition and formatting information correct for the SSD.    This is preventing me from installing Win7 on the new machine.

OK – what about installing it on the other HDD ?     It does work….. but you still can’t format the SSD.

Another possibility – is this just a bug with Microsoft’s partitioning software ?     EASEUS is a software that supposedly partitions drives.     And after a quick installation, it successfully formatted the drive.    It was weird about it though – I got progress bars on the screen, and they immediately ran to 40%.   Then they stayed there……. and when I next looked it was finished.

Thank you to whoever it was that posted about this one, and presumably he’s right.   EASEUS is partitioning software without a critical bug – Microsoft’s version of partitioning hangs when GPT has been used on the drive.     You would think, reformatting the drive and wiping out partitions would solve that problem, right ?    That’s supposed to make the drive just like new.    Apparently, that’s not the case for Windows, and it sees the GPT information and chokes.

About a minute after running EASEUS the partition is fixed; rebooted to DVD again, restarted the Windows 7 installer, and deleted the entire HDD partition and windows install.    And attempted to install again on the SSD, and it’s now “Expanding Windows Files”.

I’m not out of the woods yet.    Many other internet denizens did *something* to get this far with their SSD’s but got errors afterwards.    *Crosses fingers*

Not yet.

Fatal mistake – perhaps.   Maybe the right thing to do was to disconnect the HDD  from the SATA cable; what the installer did was create a 100MB recovery partition, on the HDD.   Then it tried to install on the SSD.    Eventually I got the error shown.

OK – without the HDD then.   Reinstalled Windows on the HDD.    Tried to get EASEUS to reformat the SSD again, and it didn’t want to do it.   Jumped back and forth, and without being sure why it worked, I eventually got the SSD formatted again.

I went for it.   I got a new error.   “Setup was unable to create a new system partition”.   Argh.

I can’t return the SSD, Newegg will not accept it.   Thanks a lot guys.     They will replace it, but really, I expect to have the same problem no matter what.    So maybe, all these circumstances, mean it’s time for me to actually install Linux.    Ubuntu is the flavor I’m most familiar with, and apparently a good one for gaming.      So why not – let’s try this out.

Will I Install Windows, or Not ?

Tags

PC Tech

These boxes will be turned into a PC !

The MSI GTX 970 suddenly appeared in the Newegg store – the final piece of the PC puzzle, at least from an ordering perspective.     (Last week I gave up on the Case question and bought a nice black box like I always do, no blinky lights.)  I plugged my cart into the website, and waited for the components to roll in.    The SSD came last – Halloween night.    And Saturday morning, 11/1, I started to troubleshoot the strange hardware problem I experienced.

CPU and Memory installed

The motherboard H97M-Plus has support for six SATA III connections at 6 GB/S each.   Four of them are enabled by default.    First thing I did was simply plug in the three components and boot up the PC.    Two were recognized – DVD and HDD; the SSD was not.     I started a support case with ASUS.   They confirmed that yes, I was supposed to have 2 SATA III cables included in with Mobo, but they weren’t there.   Not a disaster – I bought three cables at Fry’s on Halloween, 6.99 each instead of the more likely couple of bucks online.

The hardest piece to lay hands on.

After fruitless web searching for more information or others with the same problems, I moved on to careful troubleshooting.    The ASUS rep gave me the right clue : have you tried one component at a time ?    Well, no I hadn’t.   Lazy troubleshooting produced the information that :

1. All the cables worked.
2. All the ports worked
3. All the devices worked
4. Everything together, did not work.

I decided to start with the slightly foreign item.     What if the cables were bad ?   Carefully plugging each cable, to one component, produced a surprising result.   One cable only works with the DVD, if the DVD is in SATA position 1.    So we’ll go with that.     From there, I verified that SATA 2-4 each work, with each disk, with each cable.    And with SATA 2 holding the SSD and SATA 3 holding the HDD all devices are recognized.

I could have sworn I did that at some point earlier, but oh well.

Next, time to boot up the Windows 7 installation DVD, thinking I’m home free.   I immediately get an error.    “Windows cannot be installed to this disk.    error: 0x80070057.

Hmmm. What’s this about ?

I found out that a common problem people are having is installing Windows 7 to SSD’s.   No idea why, but I’m anything but alone.     What I’ve found is that the guy with the problem tends to post, then finds a solution, then disappears.    OK then, let’s try and solve this one myself.

Many fruitless google searches were conducted, although I did get introduced to the excellent Windows 7 tool DISKPART.   You can use this command prompt based tool to create, format, set as system, or even repair partitions on your system.

Advice I got from various sources included :

• “Maybe your hardware is bad”.    Nope.   Far too many people with the exact same problem as me, installing Win7 on an SSD.
• “Disable UEFI”.    I think this might have worked a couple of years back, but UEFI and the BIOS are joined at the hip on my system.    The best I can tell, is that UEFI is a GUI-based version of BIOS and it actually looks pretty slick.
• “Set your drive to be a MBR drive and reinstall”.    Well, I think this is going in the right direction, but all by itself it didn’t work.
• “Format the drive first using Diskpart”.     While I successfully got it set to be a MBR drive, I could not get it to format no matter what I did.

Command prompt, how I miss thee.

At this point, I’m trying to decide whether to give up, or just sit on the problem.      6 hours of work is certainly a long time to go without any solution popping up.

Something for every interest

Tags

City Domination, Minecraft, PC Tech, war-worlds

I did find a nether fortress, and fought my first blazes.    A bit hard, and a bit difficult – it was hard to just get one at a time.      But I got tired of the nether, collected up all the loot and went back to the overworld.    All I really need to do is collect netherrack anyway, and smelt it into nether bricks.   Then I can make nether blocks.    I do also need to harvest quartz.    I have a fair amount of all of that.

Next activity – cutting a road through more mesa, on towards the roofed forest.    This gave me a pretty good collection of various clays and sands.     And when I reached the border with the forest, I created a new bolt hole.     Nothing takes longer than cutting paths through roofed forest – with the exception of paths through jungle, or clear cutting either one.

New Bolt Hole. I like the dark oak doors, pretty cool.

Cutting through the forest.

There’s a plains fairly close past the forest, so I’m trying to finish the path through there and then head back with the loot.    My Dark Oak chest is pretty empty.

I found out that War Worlds is still going – the developer Dean has backtracked on shutting it down.     But I’d rather play a game with very little bugs like City Domination.    I am *this close* to the top 25 for individual players, a mere 6k points, which I can probably acquire by Monday.

And this is a pretty high rank in the game.

Moving in on the Warner Brothers studios. I’ll try to take Disney next.

Having finally ordered a GTX 970 and other required computer parts, I’m now waiting for the stuff to get here and create a new monster for me.     So plenty of things going on, even if it’s all very short notes and not my more enjoyed long-form blogging.

Jiggled Hardware Update

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PC Tech

I started doing some maintenance on the PC and realized that my lackadaisical approach to upgrades may have been a bad idea.    I now have a hot rod PC from back in 2007, over 7 years ago.     Oh, it’s gotten a hard drive upgrade and new video cards, but it’s showing its age at this point.     And I’m not the only one having hardware issues apparently.

I bought another 4 GB of memory and brought it up to 8 GB total (and it’s nice to have that – no more hard drive grinding as I game).     As soon as I put the sticks in, the PC failed to boot and wouldn’t even give a POST.     Jiggling cables as I put the thing back together, I managed to get it to boot.    This is not how I want my hardware – so fragile that moving cables around in the PC stops it.   Sounds like my motherboard is on its last legs.

And it sure doesn’t help that Speccy is telling me my hard drives are running hot.    Not only that – I touched them when installing the memory and found out yes, they are really hot.    Imagining them failing is not a pleasant idea, even though my backups are current.

With that, I’ve found out about PC Part Picker and I put together a proposed replacement PC.    The website is pretty neat – they aggregate the various stores price information and organize the info pretty well.    A 16 GB memory, SSD – enabled, with a traditional HDD, and a GTX 770 video card.

I am wondering what to do on the case front.    Every PC I’ve built over the years is in a plain beige/black case.     Is it time to go for something with a little more bling ?   The Antec 900 ATX midtower jumps out at me.   So does the Smilodon.    Let’s show it off a bit more than I’m used to, because the tablet generation doesn’t get why building PC’s is cool, but if it looks cool, with some blinking LED’s, that interests them.     Then again, everything I read from the serious guys says to buy different ones.   Your comments on this are appreciated.

At least, having jiggled the hardware back to working order, I don’t have to make this a panic buy.   Imagine having no gaming PC.    I know, those words should never be spoken.