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Posts Tagged ‘IT’

My Motherboard, an Asus A8V Deluxe uses the Promise Fastrak 378 onboard RAID controller and I discovered that there does not appear to be a Vista driver for this. However I decided to try using the Windows 2003 Server drivers which come on the ASUS CD and loaded them during Vista Set up and hey presto it all worked fine. I don’t seem to have any obvious issues and Vista isn’t whinging so it looks OK as a work round.

Hopefully this helps someone else in a similar situation.

Had a bad day with my main development machine yesterday. For some obscure reason during a fairly routine download it slowed right down then suffered a total lockup. I left it a good 10 minutes to see if it was going to bounce back to life as it still seemed to be responding albeit very very slowly, but I eventually gave up the ghost and decided a hard reset was the only way out. I don’t like doing this and have only done it a handful of times on this pc which has been very stable since I built it a couple of years back.

Anyway the deed was done and I waited it rebooting but it never. I simply kept going so far through the reboot and then restarting again. I tried evrything I know including adding a spare hard drive tot he system, loading an OS onto it and simply treating my main partition as a spare drive so I coul dget data off. But the main partition (SATA RAID based) kept showing an IO error and any attmpts to examine it from Windows Set up resulted in a BSOD saying error in ntfs.sys.

I tried a CHKDSK from Windows boot up from the spare disk, and this basically found my main RAID partition destroyed.

Fortunately I have a external Hard drive I use to run backups on and this has about 98% or my work on, up to about a week back.

So I decided to do a format and clean install. The Disk array came up fine though all my data is gone. I have also tried a clean boot of Vista on it and this went well- see other post as there is a way round the RAID driver issues.

So I have decided to do a full clean install onto Vista thus getting me back working with a swanky new interface. I have been using Vista quite a bit on my laptop but really want to get using it now so having a disaster like this is as good a time as any.

I am currently restoring data and programs, so if you are waiting on work from me , be aware I might be a bit delayed. My biggest problem is probably that I have lost all my email data., hopefully I should be back fully operational by the end of the weekend, hopefully with a slightly quicker PC seeing its now freshly rebuilt.

I also took the opportunity to install a spare 500Gig SATA disk as a system backup volume so I can use this to replicate my data to on a scheduled basis.

An advisory notice has been issued by Anti Viru specialists, Symantec over a mass outbreak of the Peacomm Trojan. Be aware whe receiveing mails with the following subject lines, not to open the mail or the attachment therein.

 Worm Detected!
[UNABLE TO SCAN] Worm Detected!
[WARNING - ENCRYPTED ATTACHMENT NOT VIRUS SCANNED] Virus Alert!
[WARNING - ENCRYPTED ATTACHMENT NOT VIRUS SCANNED] Worm Detected!
Worm Detected!
Undeliverable: Virus Det
[ATTENTION - NON TRAIT? PAR ANTIVIRUS -- WARNING - NOT VIRUS SCANNED]%s
Virus Detected!ected!
Virus Activity Detected!
Halleynet Web Media recommend you never access the internet without anti virus protection and not to use Auto Preview in Email clients. Read more on Symantecs website.

Came accross a funny the other day- not been playing pC games since I had my arm op last week but have enough movement now to play on the Xbox360 (still stiff though).

Had a game of team survival on Rainbow 6 Vegas and the guys playing were very cagey about me ( a relative noob- only pfc rank) hitting the A button. However in what was an otherwise reasonable game I discovered they were playing on a glitch that allows the host to keep everyone in the ranked match but to repetitively restart the game thus getting everyone loads of experience points and rankups.

I am not going to detail how its done as other people have more detailed write ups than I could provide- try here- this is about as explicit a posting of how it works…. enjoy your new rank ups! Having been through this once I benefited slightly I am now rank: Specialist but don’t think I could be bothered with doing this all the time, plus it rather defeats the point of the game.