One of those weeks...

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Ever have one of those weeks (or stretches) where nothing seems to go right? Our HD 6900 series article should have been posted last week, but wasn't due to a multitude of problems that arose during testing with our test machine. This is not the fault of the cards, but something else to do with the motherboard. Those problems are all gone, at least for the time-being.

In wrapping up the article, though, the power button on the chassis (HAF X) became stuck, which was shorting out the connection to the motherboard. I unplugged the power switch ATX connector, but that wasn't enough... all of those chassis connectors had to be unplugged. After about an hour of fiddling around, I finally managed to fix the button, but what a pain in the ass.

I had to also reset the BIOS, so I pushed the CMOS clear button on the back of the motherboard, and the freaking cover for it fell off! That made the button there stick in for some reason, and once again, that took me some time to fix. The PC works now, but I can't use that CMOS clear anymore.

So the time came for me to wrap up the graphs, which I started while in Linux through my virtual machine. I was almost done them, so I was glad to boot it up again and finally pound out this article. Until I saw this error:

Unable to open file "G:\VMware\Windows XP Professional (32-bit)\Windows XP Professional (32-bit)-000001.vmdk": The system cannot find the file specified.

Of course, the file IS there, and VMware can't use it in either Windows or Linux. I looked around the Web, but there is no simple fix, or one at all. It looks like I'll need to wipe the entire VM and start one from scratch. What I did before this broke was pause the VM, which is natural, and then came back to it later. SOMETHING got botched in the meantime and ruined it though, along with all the work I put into the graphs up to that point.

*sigh*

/rant
 
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Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
At least you weren't goofing around with your son and had your hand slip causing his head to bounce off the floor. All I can say is thank goodness for area rugs!
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
At least you weren't goofing around with your son and had your hand slip causing his head to bounce off the floor. All I can say is thank goodness for area rugs!

Ouch man. I could see how that could happen though, so hard to be 100% careful all the time.
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
Ouch man. I could see how that could happen though, so hard to be 100% careful all the time.
I felt like the biggest d-bag ever but kids are incredibly resilient...more than computer hardware anyway. Sucks about the delays, especially when I'm sure you have a bunch of other things on the go too.
 

DarkStarr

Tech Monkey
lmao I had only heard good things about the Haf X till now, wonder if maybe its just you. How the heck did the button fall off the clear? That's just crazy, I broke my PCIe slot locking tab on my bottom slot the other day, was a PITA to remove and superglue it back together. The VM thing is just odd.
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
Maybe this should be the official bitch about your day, week, month thread.

I just found out that our daycare provider is sick and will be closed tomorrow so now I am going to be rocking out with my son all morning (which is going to kick ass mind you) until my in-laws come over to watch him while I go to work.

The free time in the morning was going to be used to finish up my Christmas shopping for my wife on the down low so now I'm hosed! I don't think I have ANY free time to make it happen between now and the 25th!

To quote Charlie Brown, "Good grief!"

***EDIT: -AND- I just spend 5 minutes fishing around in the garbage for something that shouldn't have been thrown out!
 
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Tharic-Nar

Senior Editor
Staff member
Moderator
I just had one of those weeks as well (2).... though i think i'm back for the most part...

PC hardware failure, the joys of... I remember as if it was last week...

WinXP, Hard drive spins down for power save, doesn't want to spin up... OS crashes as a result. Reboot, BIOS stuck on IDE detect... i pull WTF face. Powerdown completely, turn off PSU at switch, wait a few mins, turn back on, boots up, load Win7. 20mins into session, windows hangs, BSODs quickly. This in itself is not new, since win7 dislikes my AGP card (I'm antiquated...). While booting, it hangs at the IDE detect again... what joy. The short of it, a failing disk controller on the motherboard. Luckily i have 2 controllers, one Silicone Image and one Intel, the Silicone Image controller is the one that's failed.

The worries do not end there though. WinXP can't boot via the Intel controller without AHCI enabled due to some quirk, since if the controller is set to RAID, it requires a boot disk and additional drivers etc, the whole F6 during install scenario. Win7 can't boot while on that controller with AHCI enabled, seems to be a problem with the WD hard drive and Win7. So, i have to choose between a working and old OS or a new and unstable OS.... choices... So i go with the old, XP... Problem, the hard drive is failing... its spin up times are rather funky and has a maximum throughput of about 6MB/s... time to get a replacement. Order one online... and what do you know, the UK is having a serious snow problem, and living out in the country where there are no such thing as snow ploughs and gritters... the postal service is at the mercy of the weather. The short of it... it took 2 weeks to deliver a 'Next Day Delivery' Item. Stuck for over a week in scotland (gotta love Amazon for setting up a depot in the middle of nowhere), then when it finally moved south, the snow struck again, catching it in bristol for another week.

So the hard drive arrives, i commence a backup with acronis... 10 hours later (for 100GB... ), only to find it failed the verify. Try again, it succeeds, swap the hard drives round, fiddle with the bios, restore takes 30mins (love the new drive). Boot up and i have XP again. yay...

If only i could fix this damn issue with Win7...

Anyway, i'm back again... mostly...
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Sigh, this HAS to be the week of things to go wrong.

On Tuesday afternoon, my DSL router died, so I went almost a full two days without Internet access. I published Ryan's review of Arctic's headset via a 1/5 bar unsecured wireless access point... talk about fun ;-)

Jamie, I can't believe the amount of problems you are experiencing there. I replied to some of this in an e-mail, so I won't go over it all again here.
 

Psi*

Tech Monkey
Since we are having a wining party (intentional bad pun), I just replaced a motherboard and then a PSU to still get NOTHING!?!?! I just received a cheap 775 CPU to throw that in ... sometime ... probably next given the interruptions:mad: in the next few days. bah humbug:rolleyes:

Back to the winy opening, "if I had time, I would be an alcoholic. But it takes all day to do just a 15 minute job for myself!" said by a former boss of mine back in the day when I had real jobs.

On the positive side, shipping from Amazon & Newegg has been absolutely stellar. And that is given my totally last minute Christmas shopping. Which obviously was not as last minute as I thought ... I still had a couple of days!:D
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
I'll take a stab at the next round of woe is me.

My son's daycare provider had the flu on Sunday. It is a nasty bug that makes your body do things your body shouldn't do. We decided to keep him home Monday and yesterday because we didn't want him getting sick for Christmas.

Since life has been so hectic I hadn't finished my Chirstmas shopping for my wife and could not find anybody to run me around on Monday. By yesterday I was at Christmas shopping DEFCON-5 but along came Dad to bail me out.

After a swing and a miss on two things and a home run on two others I decided to call it quits because I had to work in the afternoon. We are on our way home and doesn't a transport decide to play kissy face with us! If this was Optimus Prime I'd be all high fives and big ups but it wasn't AND my son was in the car!

It sound and felt really bad but luckily my son had fallen asleep in the back and ended up sleeping through the whole thing. He even stayed asleep until about 30 minutes after it happened. Of course I was a wreck and my father called me this morning to apologize after being a mess all night thinking about what could have happened.

In the end we are all fine, the cow catcher/pedestrian masher on the front of the truck made hamburger out of an aluminum rim, tire, rear quarter panel and back bumper so I guess that is the best case scenerio, if it had to play out at all.

...AND I'M STILL NOT DONE MY SHOPPING!
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Well, I'm sure glad I'm not alone in having a shit week ;-)

Glad you are alright, Optix! I can't believe some of the things babies can sleep through, it's insane.
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
I think the week before Christmas is the week that is out to get everybody. Three of my co-workers had their car break down, another had their water heater up and die and another snapped a key off in their lock at 2am.

No matter what happens, something worse could have happened. Sometimes I lose sight of that but that little incident sure put it into perspective.
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
I think the week before Christmas is the week that is out to get everybody. Three of my co-workers had their car break down, another had their water heater up and die and another snapped a key off in their lock at 2am.

I think this all has to do more with it being cold as hell rather than Xmas :p
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
Again, it could be worse. I used to game with a guy from Alberta and he was online all the time one week. When I asked him what was up he said it's too cold to leave the house. His car wouldn't start and walking was suicide. -43.

Forget that!

Our city may be dirty, smelly, built on a refinery and pulp mill and the only real jobs seem to be in call centers but we don't have weather like that. No earthquakes, typhoons or plague of locusts.
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Ahh, I love adding to this.

The external flash unit for my camera just died, so there's a nice $300 expense that I didn't plan on. Of course, this would have to happen a mere week before CES, where I absolutely need it :S
 
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