So it happens I have some kind of a challenge with my 2TB HDD (Samsung HD204UI). I used Acronis to create two partitions, 32GB for the OS (Win2003 Enterprise) and the rest for data. Both partitions are aligned to the physical 4k sectors. The system runs fine as long as I don't have a certain amount of traffic on the HDD. When I run torrent 24/7, the system hangs after around 3 to 4 days, when I encode video to H.264/AVC it even hangs after around 12 hours. I suspect the HDD since this never happened before I used the 2TB HDD.

Even though:
system specs

edit: solved! The IPv6 Protocol Stack was at fault here and died regularely, killing the whole OS on its way down the drain . . .
Honestly I can't help you with your issue.
But this just crossed my mind, since we have at home have a central server set up.
You could try running Linux on it?
applesauce said:
You could always get a USB audio mixer, the cheap Chinese ones start at like $10, I have a branded one I bought in town for about $50. It's actually kind of handy for me, because I plug my mic into it and it has dials so I can turn my mic up or down as needed. That being said, I don't usually set it up unless my laptop is staying in one place for a while.
Ohh? Could you give a link to such a thing? I assume it let's you put the individual cables for rear, front, mid and bass into the 'mixer', which in turn you can connect to your laptop? I got 5 cables running from my Subwoofer/station to my PC.

Also is the output going to be 5.1 or will it be converted to stereo?

ps: Did somebody see the Samsung CES stuff? I really hope the flexible screen will be used sometime in the near future.
Artwork said:
Ohh? Could you give a link to such a thing? I assume it let's you put the individual cables for rear, front, mid and bass into the 'mixer', which in turn you can connect to your laptop? I got 5 cables running from my Subwoofer/station to my PC.

Also is the output going to be 5.1 or will it be converted to stereo?
I think with a bit of software you can get something like this to work. As for it being 5.1 or stereo, it all depends on how you would rig it up, I'm pretty sure USB has fast enough data transfer for 5.1

Actually, now that I think about it, they make USB sound cards. Derp. Something like this would be much cheaper an easier, just without the minor bells and whistles. Of course the exact one you get depends on what you need.

Artwork said:
ps: Did somebody see the Samsung CES stuff? I really hope the flexible screen will be used sometime in the near future.
I was a bit disappointed with CES, almost nothing was really new if you had been keeping up. Ah well, maybe they are saving the best for last.
Ok guys so here's a quick video of my computer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwNQcSLKt2s

The video was originally made for a guy named Chris. Either that or all your names to me are Chris ;)

The specs are in the description as well as in the last post on the previous page of this forum. Took 4 hours to build. My room is a little messy because of all the boxes from the parts. I'm still waiting on the ram, mouse, and OS to arrive so I'm sure I'll have an updated video when i have it running.
It took me about 4 months to decide... Starting around september. But I finally got a new laptop.
The Lenovo Y500 with SLI graphics. Pretty much a gaming laptop, but it doesn't feel like one. It's not thick, just a litttttle bit thinner than my previous Asus. A bit heavier though. But 200g is neglect able.
They keyboard has a red backlight with a red accent around the keys which looks awesome. Never had a backlit keyboard so this is really ++ for me. Audio is great for a laptop, speakers are loud!! and still fairly crisp and clear. I can even feel a little punch above ~25% . It's fast too, my Asus was pretty slow. Booting is fast, even without a decent SSD. (Only has a 16gb caching ssd). I will be buying a SSD later this week and replacing the caching one. Expecting boot times to be even faster.
Haven't tried any games yet. Will try some tomorrow, Skyrim, Guild Wars 2 etc. Lets see if it can handle high settings on FHD with 30+ fps. I need to get some sleep but I want to play around with this thing. Ha ha. Just a little bit longer ^^

Ohh and I am used to a QWERTY keyboard, but I got the laptop from Germany so this one has a QWERTZ keyboard. I just changed the settings to US, so it's not a big deal. But it does look strange when you actually start looking down.
And another issue, this time with my main machine.

I bought me a new BD-RE writer, the LG BH16NS40. Now this thing is a SATA device and my FOXCONN 915P7AD does have 4 SATA ports onboard. Unfortunately, when I connect more than 1 device to those ports, my system freezes at boot time and I see nothing more than a black screen and my 500GB HDD is already a SATA device. This also happened before with another SATA HDD from a friend I tried to connect to my system to kill the viruses on it. Guess what, with the additional HDD also just a black screen.

Maybe I somehow killed the BIOS and have to re-write it to the flash chip?
Could there be a problem with the SATA ports themself?

Well computers do sometimes get life in themself and love to screw you over.
Hrm, I could check that by connecting the HDD to another port and boot the system up. If everything's fine, then the problem might be different. Will check this, stay tuned . . .
also, check boot order in bios.
The boot order is fine, BIOS is set to boot from that specific HDD and no other devices. Checked the other SATA ports, as long as only that HDD is connected, everything's fine. As soon as I attach a second SATA device, no matter if another HDD or an optical drive, I get the same blank screen when I power up the system. Not even the BIOS of my graphics card does display its message on the screen.

I decided to just give up on that and use the IDE -> SATA adapter instead, I bought about a year ago (as soon as I happen to find it, that is). I only hope the onboard RAID controller won't do weird stuff when an optical drive is attached to it.
Are you also using a SSD? Check Legacy Support and EUFI.
Nope, no SSD. Also the BIOS is a plain legacy BIOS, not one of those newer EFI beasts.
Make sure your P/SATA connection in your BIOS are set properly. If yours is old and not EFI/UEFI, it might be set by default to LEGACY mode for the SATA ports. If you've used EIDE/PATA, you should remember you NEED to set Master/Slave/Cable Select jumpers on the drives when using more than one device on a channel (PATA is restricted to 2 device/channel).

Check the SATA BIOS settings and see if they have a setting of something like LEGACY, SATA, RAID, or AHCI modes. (NOTE: You MIGHT need to reinstall the OS if you need to swap interface mode. This is true for RAID vs AHCI modes. You might luck out on a non-RAID to another non-RAID mode switch. No guarantees.)

Lastly, check the jumper pins on your main HDD. SATA drives shouldn't have/need any jumpers installed unless you're running them with certain features enabled/disable (like staggered spin up.) Also, I don't know the age of your HDD, but back when SATA/PATA connections were still VERY common on consumer boards, some HDDs were manufactured with both connections as well. (The SATA power connection was left out. You have PATA/SATA/MOLEX and Jumper Pins.)

The HDD SHOULD have the jumper settings labelled on it some place. If your MB is in SATA/RAID/AHCI mode (and not LEGACY, which would force the MB to emulate the SATA ports as EIDE/PATA ports), make sure you have no pins shorted with a jumper. If you are in some sort of legacy modea and you want to keep it that way, well, good luck. Manufacturers take it for granted that SATA is the de facto standard now and don't mention much about jumper settings. You'd have to look them up online or something.

You'd also have to figure out how the SATA ports are teamed up on channels if the latter part of the previous paragraph is the case. I've never seen a MB with more that 2 EIDE/PATA ports without add-on storage controllers. And I'm not aware of ANY controller that supports more than 2 PATA ports without being some sort of enterprise-grade RAID controller... If that... Though I would think port 0 + 1 would be one channel and 2 + 3 the other. (Did you ever try putting one drive on Port 0 and another on Port 2? Offset the port number by one if you don't see a port 0. Manufacturers don't always use the same labelling scheme. Still, with digital equipment, many things start with 0 as the first number.)

Hopefully this will help you a bit in narrowing down a probably cause of your problem.
further details about P/SATA settings
So I got a Raspberry Pi yesterday and spent seven hours playing around with it. I'll have to wait for omxplayer to support subtitles properly to use it as a full-fledged mediacenter but it works wonderfully right now for hd xvid or h264 mkv files.

I'll also probably get a small hdd powered over usb in the future to move the bittorrent client from my netbook to the pi and have it run a webclient so I don't need to keep my netbook running all the time.

Installing Archlinux on the SD card was easy enough (took a mere 3 minutes) and I could boot immediately and got a console. Typically for arch, that was pretty much it. Since my router isn't in physical proximity of the Pi and I needed internet access to get the packages I need, I used my netbook as a wifi stick (lol) by configuring it so it will share internet access over ethernet.

After that, I had pacman update the system first and installed X, LXDE and SLiM to get a desktop environment and a graphical login screen without first logging in using the console (of course, these needed to be configured first, as well).

After that I was more or less playing around for a while, seeing what the hardware can do (do not even THINK about using firefox on that, dillo is pretty much the only decently running browser on the Pi. Well that or console browsers).

Then, as there was no package for omxplayer available in the repository (omxplayer uses the faily powerful gpu on the pi to decode xvid and h264), I had to compile and install it myself (thanks to AUR and build scripts, that was fairly easy except it was assuming I use sudo, which I don't), though it took about 15 minutes to compile.

I'm also thinking about using it as a local web development server or maybe put a svn server on it or or or. There's so much you could do with it :D
I need help with data recovery from my external HHD. It broke today so I'm trying to get my data back.

When I plug it in my computer it make some beeping sound for a short while then goes silent. My computer do find something is plugged in the USB port but doesn't find the HDD.

edit: I also notice that the port to external HDD is loose. There lies another problem why it won't connect to my computer. Even though the lights are on.
Some external HDDs are actually usb box with internal 2.5" disk, you may extract it and connect to PC directly for SATA version and with some adapter for IDE. And try another PC.

Hint: backup.
How many giga of ssd should I have for my os and other programs I want to access fast, and what do I need to do to utilize all the cores in my processor?
Most programs are incapable of using more than 1 core simultaneously, or we would all have graphics cards for processors. (Modern GPUs have hundreds of cores at low individual clock rates) For this reason I would recommend a powerful dual, tri, or quad core rather than opting for the cool sounding hex and octo-cores.

As for an SSD, I'd recommend 120 or 128GB if you only want core programs on it. 64GB is plausible if you are a person capable sorting your data daily ect.
Thanks, I will use your advice in my future build.
I got an 128gb SSD in my laptop together with 1tb HDD. You are able to fit a few games on the SSD, mits they're not too large. I got Guildwars 2, Skyrim, Dead space 3 and Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning on it, together with the OS (Windows 8) and I still have 27gb free space. - However I try to install all other programs on a special partition from the HDD. Software like adobe, java, steam or any other program which doesn't really benefit from the extra fast SSD.
ranting about my current ISP
ranting about Micro$ofts stupidity
...I can't see that working well. Server 2k3 is 2 years younger than XP. I'm pretty sure there's gonna be incompatibilities there. Even if you DO get it to work somehow, I get a feeling the XP w/ 2k3 components install will be unstable.

XP x64 edition would be an easier fix. XP x64 is based on the 2k3 x64 codebase.

Also, you have to remember, XP came our in 2001. Back then, breaking the 4GB-barrier was unheard of. Most systems maxed out at 2GB back then. MS wasn't expecting:

  • XP to live as long as it has
  • Vista to take so damn long to develop
  • Vista to flop as much as it did
The latter two feeding back into/reinforcing the first, of course.

I switched to XP x64 in 2007. Most stable OS I had until my move to Win7 x64 in late 2009. Only had BSoDs a handful of times in the 2 years I actively used that system. Even then, it was mostly from a driver fault on part of ATI/AMD during the late 2008/early 2009 winter period. They somehow managed to fuck up the x64 GPU drivers. Systems would BSoD the moment Windows tried to load. It wasn't just me. Everyone with XP x64 at the time had to roll back to the 8.11 or 8.10 Catalyst drivers until AMD/ATI unfucked everything a couple of months later.
StahnAileron said:
... Also, you have to remember, XP came our in 2001. Back then, breaking the 4GB-barrier was unheard of. Most systems maxed out at 2GB back then. ...
But still, Microsofts plans back then were to develop Codename Whistler as Workstation and Server in one go (as they did on all Versions of Windows NT before including Win2000). In the end they decided to further develop Server 2003 for a little longer but the Workstation part was ready for the wild. And still, WinXP was shipped with a PAE ready kernel (also Win2000 was), on my system it uses the PAE kernel (no clue, how managed to accomplish that) and even without PAE 32bit CPUs are able to address and thus use 4GB of RAM. Have a look at the more recent Win 7. Its 32bit version also restricts the user to 3GB of usable memory. I just don't understand why. Even Windows 2000 Advanced Server (remember, there never was a x64 version of Win2000) supports up to 8GB RAM. For stuff like this I hate capitalistic oriented companies. And sadly XP x64 isn't an option for me, since I would have to get the german MUI from somewhere (sources welcome at this point!) and also I'd have to drop my SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 Digital, since there're no x64 drivers out there for my baby.
Installed Win XP Pro x64 for testing purposes on my Laptop, runs nicely up until now.

ranting about nVidias most recent driver

edit: solved! by reverting to the previous v310.90
editedit: after ~1.5 hours of watching anime screen went blank again, the issue is again the same as mentioned within the spoiler ... will revert again to the previousprevious version
Charly said:
[...] Have a look at the more recent Win 7. Its 32bit version also restricts the user to 3GB of usable memory. I just don't understand why. [...]
Last I recall, PAE just extends the address space to 40-bits (or less. I forget how large the extendsion is off hand.) Also, 32-bit is a total of 4GB of address for EVERYTHING. It's not just system RAM. That includes GPU RAM (GPU RAM is not exclusive to the video card when it comes to addressing), system devices, etc. Everything in a computer takes of some amount of address space.

I think PAE on 32-bit Windows is working like it supposed to. At least for consumer stuff. Honestly, I think the vast majority of the PAE addresses are reserved for Page File addressing (i.e. Swap File). THe Page File can be pretty friggin' big since it upper limit is theoretically the size of you HDD it resides on. (Or total storage on later OSes. I think Win7 lets you set up a page files on multiple HDDs.)

WinXP x64 is directly based on the 2k3 Server kernel. (Most applications that can ID OSes will see it as Win2k3 Server, not WinXP.) I loved that OS. It was just such a chore to find system utilities and such that were fully compatible with it.
StahnAileron said:
... PAE just extends the address space to 40-bits (or less. I forget how large the extendsion is off hand.) ...
36 bits, making it possible for the CPU to address 64 GiB memory in total. 40 bits was the address bus width for AMDs first Athlon 64 CPUs, with the second generation of x86-64 CPUs AMD extended it further to (iirc) 48 bits.

StahnAileron said:
... Also, 32-bit is a total of 4GB of address for EVERYTHING. It's not just system RAM. That includes GPU RAM (GPU RAM is not exclusive to the video card when it comes to addressing), system devices, etc. Everything in a computer takes of some amount of address space. ...
Oh? Then why does Win Server 2003 Enterprise Edition support 64 GiB of RAM in the 32bit version (see above, PAE = 36 bits = 64 GiB memory)?

StahnAileron said:
... I think the vast majority of the PAE addresses are reserved for Page File addressing (i.e. Swap File). THe Page File can be pretty friggin' big since it upper limit is theoretically the size of you HDD it resides on. (Or total storage on later OSes. I think Win7 lets you set up a page files on multiple HDDs.)
Sorry to dissappoint you, already Win NT4 was able to create multiple page files on multiple HDDs. In fact I did use that feature back then, having two page files of 64 MiB on two HDDs of about 504 MB in my system at that time.

StahnAileron said:
WinXP x64 is directly based on the 2k3 Server kernel. (Most applications that can ID OSes will see it as Win2k3 Server, not WinXP.) I loved that OS. It was just such a chore to find system utilities and such that were fully compatible with it.
In fact it's based on Win Server 2003 SP1. There never were x64 editions of Win XP/Server 2003 before SP1. Though, the first 64bit edition of XP (for the Intel Itanium Processor) was based on the XP kernel. The newer 64bit edition (with support for Itanium 2 processors) was also based on Server 2003 kernel. I did my homework when it comes to Windows versions and editions ;)
Then you just have to live with the fact MS was saving the good shit for their enterprise products back then when it came to RAM support.

Hell, technically, current consumer level 64-bit Windows is software capped at I think 192GB or something like that ("lower-grade" edition caps are lower). This despite 64-bit containing about 18EB of address space. (MS can supposedly unlock/increase the caps via software updates if the market demands it. i.e. RAM capacities per module get high and cheap enough to make RAM amounts bump up against the limit too easily and often.)

Hoenstly, I think it's MS being pragmatic. They are a large, publicly traded corporation. They have a bottom to think about. I don't agree with half the shit these types of companies do, but I do understand the reasoning being their actions, sorta.

But yeah, it sucks when you think you have to hack something together to meet your needs/wants.