Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: diamondgeezer on February 18, 2005, 02:46:30 am
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Yo. So my bro's computer started randomly restarting. Kind of like Blaster, only AVG and Ad-Aware came up squeaky clean. It got worse and worse, so we concluded that a format and reinstall was the way forward.
So I needed to back up just a few bits in My Documents. I couldn't move them to another parttion, the PC just restarted. I didn't want particularly to put a possibly infected HD in my own comp, so I hit upon the, frankly, genius idea of downloading a Knoppix CD at work.
I take it home and fire it up, and lo and behold I'm using Linux on a CD. BUT, I can't copy **** around. It won't let me write to any of my HD partitions (on either HD). And when I located the CD burning tool, the OS just packed up after a couple of minutes of writing. Thus, my first question is: does this sound like normal Knoppix behaviour?
Eventually I proclaim the immortal words "**** this for a game of soldiers" and go plonk the offending HD in my own box. I back up what I need, and all is peachy. I replace the disk in my bro's box and boot off my (legit, but stolen off a friend) XP Home CD. I delete the appropriate partition and create a new one, formatting it as NTFS, natch. But when the installer is copying files across it all goes tits up.
Basically it reports not being able to copy such and such a file. Not always the same file, mind. Gets to somewhere around 30-50% before deciding to go on strike. Now, I'm going to try to locate one of my more, how to say, legal grey-area copies of Winders later on but I'm wondering if this string of problems suggests a problem with the disk itself? Place your bets.
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Diamond Geezer is not a morning person
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Sounds to me like the disk is thoroughly fux0red.
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It sounds like it may be your bro's CPU/RAM. If it was rebooting sporatically like that, as well as WinXP install failure, I would imagine it be a system problem. If the drive was bad, it would recognise the sector as unable to read and/or write, and either skip over it, or send a SMART index to the drive. Is SMART enabled on the PC? If not, I'd enable it just to make sure.
Anyhow, did you low-level format the partition before files were installing?
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Of course I considered the possiblity of overheating, but the CPU was being reported at ~50-60°, and the system's always been pretty warm. That said the hard drives were pretty damn toasty, although I've never heard of an overheating HD causing such problems. And starting from cold ought to give a few minutes of use before an overheating problem kicks in yesno
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Diamond Geezer's favourite season is winter
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Welll, you can't write NTFS using Linux. Not really, anyway. So that explains the **** you've had with Knoppix not copying to the other partition, most likely. Otherwise, you forgot to mount the partition as read/write. It might just be a bit of an idea to RTFM for Knoppix, too.
As for the HD, have you run scandisk on it? As for as such a tool exisits for NTFS, anyway.
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I did R some of TFM for Knoppix, the parts that seemed relevant anyway. I'm going to run the drive through Partition Magic on my box tonight, see if that picks up any errors. Ph34r my exciting Friday night :blah:
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Diamond Geezer is very well spoken
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perhaps the power-supply is malfunctioning.
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[color=66ff00]Linux won't (safely) write to NTFS. FAT32 is ok as is any of the *nix file systems (and a few others not relevant to this).
As for the seizure: Knoppix expands itself into whatever ram you have and tries to find a usable, free diskspace volume. If it only has RAM to work with then you have very little effective memory and everything slows to a crawl. I've had it freeze up on certain rigs. On low memory systems it's better to start with xfce as the DT manager instead of the default; KDE, which is a bit of a monster that tries to do everything.
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Ow, my brain (http://instagiber.net/smiliesdotcom/cwm/cwm/freak3.gif)
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Diamond Geezer is 22 years old
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[color=66ff00]You want some clarification?
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Hard Drive manufacturer please.