Signs of Success

A good customer of mine has a borrowed Toshiba Satellite A100 laptop, which the owner had already bought some extra ram for, and I was asked to do the memory upgrade. I took out the old ram, inserted the new, and whir click, whir click – it won’t boot, won’t even show the splash screen. Obviously there is something wrong with the ram. With no obvious reason to suspect the ram being faulty,  I looked at other aspects of the problem.

It looks right, and matches all the specs, and several suppliers will swear that it is the correct ram for the computer, but multiple entries on the web point to the same problem. Do a search on “satellite a100 memory upgrade wont boot” and you will see what I mean. None of them will make much sense, but using what they say, and with some experimentation of my own, this is the situation.

The official spec for the computer says it uses DDR2 PC4200 ram, up to 2 gigabytes in two 1 gigabyte pieces.

The ram supplied to me was DDR2 PC5300 1GB x 2.

The computer currently has in it 1 piece of DDR2 PC4200 of 256MB, and 1 piece of DDR2 PC5300 of 512MB. Surprisingly it works!

It seems that to operate at all, the computer requires at least one of the memory sticks to be DDR2 PC4200. This is easily proved as follows

1. take the DDR2 PC5300 stick out, leaving just the DDR2 PC4200 stick and it boots fine.
2. take the DDR2 PC4200 stick out, leaving just the DDR2 PC5300 stick and it won’t boot.
3. leave the DDR2 PC4200 stick in and put in one of the supplied sticks, and will boot OK, showing 1.18 GB of ram.
4. leave the DDR2 PC5300 stick in and put in one of the supplied sticks, and it won’t boot.
4. put in both sticks of the new ram, and it won’t boot.

This is a really peculiar problem, which neither Toshiba or ram suppliers seem to know about or acknowledge.  Toshiba will probably say stick to what the spec says, which is fair enough. Some (most?) ram suppliers seem to recommend the PC5300 ram.

Other than sticking with PC4200 ram, there doesn’t appear to be  a solution. Fortunately, PC4200 ram is still available at a reasonable price, so if it is considered worthwhile, the memory can be upgraded.

Over the last couple of years I have come across a lot of drives with bad sectors. Sometimes these can be fixed just using chkdsk /R in Windows Recovery, but sometimes the error seems to be much ‘deeper’ and nothing much seems to fix it. If the drive really is faulty, or you just want to upgrade it or repartition it, bad sectors can be a real problem.

First issue is actually cloning a hard drive with bad sectors. My cloning tool of choice is Cloneziilla, which is free and reasonably straightforward to use. However in beginners mode, it too will fail on a disk with bad sectors. The solution here is to use Clonezilla in expert mode, which is not as daunting as it sounds. Just read the options carefully, and it quickly becomes apparent that ticking the appropriate option (-rescue I think)  will ignore bad sectors. Cloning will now take place, but if there are many bad sectors (as with a physically damaged disc) this could take a long time.

The second problem occurs with the cloned partition, which will have ‘cloned bad sectors’, not really bad, but the HDD is pretty convinced they are. Unless you want an identically sized partition, you will need to resize the partition, and I do this by booting into a live disc copy of Ubuntu. In ubuntu the tool to edit partitions is called Partition Editor, or Gparted depending on which flavour of Ubuntu you are using. This tool allows simple resizing of partions, EXCEPT when the partition has bad sectors, including cloned bad sectors.

Gparted uses NTFSRESIZE to resize NTFS partitions, and while native NTFSRESIZE has the ability to ignore bad sectors, this is not included in Gparted, so Gparted always fail to resize partitions with bad sectors. I searched for weeks to find a solution to this one, and here it is. THis is a really dangerous fix, so don’t mess about with your only copy of a disk, clone it first and work on the clone. As I was cloning the partittion, I was already in that position. THe description in the page is a little technical, and everything can be done by using the Ubuntu gui front end. I do this in the Ubuntu live disc boot, so none of this is permanent, so I have to do it each time. Here is the list of actions I take.

In a terminal window (Accessories/terminal) type Sudo Nautilus

In nautilus drill down into /usr/sbin, and rename NTFSRESIZE to NTFSRESIZE.orig by rightclicking on it and choosing rename.

In nautilus rightclick between file icons and choose create document, and name the new file NTFSRESIZE

Right click on the new file, click on Properties, and then select Permissions, and tick the make executable option

Open the empty file, and add the lines

#!/bin/bash

exec ntfsresize.orig –bad-sectors “$@”

and save the file.

Now restart Gparted, and select the offending partition, and resize it. Gparted will throw up an error or warning about bad sectors, but will complete the task. All we have done here is basically added the –bad-sectors parameter to any call of NTFSRESIZE, which is now just a script that calls the original NTFSRESIZE with the parameter added. It is a very clever workaround, and I am very grateful to the original poster. This post is just spreading the word, and if you happen upon this post, please use and enjoy if this is what you are looking for.

A customer recently brought a lap to be fixed, about 6 years old, 1.7Gig Compaq nx6120 with 512meg of ram. It quickly became apparent that the IDE 60GB drive was damaged beyond recovery. I informed the customer of the cost of a drive and rebuilding the operating system onto a new drive, and transferring data etc, and apparently it was more than the cost of the computer This happens more and more with older machines, particularly when you look in the adverts and see brand new netbooks running Windows 7 for $350, fixing older machines is just not worth the expense. So the customer decided to scrap the laptop and left it with me to dispose of. I gave her a large discount off the amount I would have charged her for the work I had done to cover the possibly ‘spares’ I could take off it.

I too wasn’t up for the cost of a new notebook IDE drive, which are getting quite silly compared to SATA drives. However, in my box of bits I had a 16GB compact flash card which I previously used in an old computer and used as a web server. I decided the time had come to build my self a laptop with a solid state drive!

First stop, a company called Nice Gear in Timaru, who sold me an adapter to allow me to install the CF card into the IDE drive bay of the laptop, cost including postage – $20! The card was installed just a few minutes after the adaptor arrived, and worked beautifully.

So what operating system to use? The card had Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on it, which had been upgraded to full webserver spec. It ran, but was a bit old, and a bit slow. It had also been modified to run on an SSD. This involves minimizing the amount of unnecessary and repetitive disk writing, by disabling the log files, and not updating files and directories each time they are viewed, and by not having a swap file. This sort of thing is not possible in Windows, so wanting to preserve my CF card for a few years longer, decided to stick with Linux, in particular Ubuntu, which I have experience of.

So my first try was an upgrade from 8.04 to 11.04. This worked after a fashion, but stopped after I made a few changes to it. So I tried a clean install of 9.04, which worked very well, so well that I though an upgrade to 11.04 would definitely be on the cards, as 11.04 is probably more efficient than 9.04. The upgrade worked OK, but with a couple of errors, which translated through into another locked up system after an hour or so of fiddling!

So finally, I did a clean install of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) on the CF card, which took up less than 3GB of my available 16GB. Ir ran a bit slow at first, but seemed to settle down, and now runs reasonably well. First job was to tailor the OS for running on a Solid State Drive (SSD). A search on the web will turn up lots of resources for this, the one I used was provided by the “How to Geeks” – thanks lads. I also needed some information on stopping the EXT4 file system journaling, which speeds up the system and saves writes to the disk. This blog gives the details on the first page, and the other pages cover  the stuff in the HowToGeeks page

I have spent a happy day loading on various software and hardware, including getting my Telecom T-Stick and Vodem to work. This is a lot simpler than it was last time I wrote about it. Both systems are now fully integrated into the Ubuntu system, and it can all be done from the “Edit Connection” button in the connections  menu. I also set up evolution mail to access my various email accounts, and transferred my outlook.pst over from my desktop, to give me a basis for work on the machine in the future.

So total investment $20, plus about $150 of CF card being used again, and a few hours of my time (OK, 12 or so if you include the three tries at the operating system) setting it up. Not the fastest machine in the house, but so long as you stick to one task at a time, is reasonably lively. I am not sure how long the laptop is going to last. Without a hard drive, it is running a lot cooler (and quieter!) so may last a bit longer – it had serious overheating problems with the faulty hard drive in. However, some damage will have been done.

The next question is do I splash out on some more ram? 512MB is not enough, 1024MB would probably be plenty for an Ubuntu machine, cost to upgrade about $50 to $70. Without the extra ram I am quite wary of putting on LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL and PHP) which I need to do web development on it, so I may need to bite the bullet on that one.

Next job? Well by this time next week I hope to have bought a copy of Windows 98 SE for a dollar or two off TradeMe. This I will put onto my 10 year old retired desk top. The reason for this apparently backward step is so that I can use the force feedback steering wheel I have knocking around. It will only work on a machine with Windows 98 or less on it. The driving game I want to  use on it, Colin McRae rally 3 won’t run on anything less than Windows 98 SE! Hence the very specific operating system requirement. If it works as well as I hope it will, I will “acquire” a sports seat from somewhere, and build a framework for it, the pedals and steering wheel, and the computer monitor(s), to make a driving game console. I also have a GP game too, so there will be some variety! Stay tuned – this one may need photos!

The Freeview reception was so much better with a freeview box than with the computer, but it still wasn’t perfect. On very windy days we would get some signal drop out on TVNZ channels, but it was close enough to give us hope.

So, I started looking at the antenna again. The Freeview website said that our address had a high probability of getting reception with a high mounted aerial.The aerial was on the ridge line of our roof, but not the higher ridge line. We also had a VHF aerial diplexed in, and an amplifier behind the TV set. A last ditch plan was hatched!

Firstly, move the aerial from the lower ridge line to the higher ridge line, just 1 metre away, and just 600mm higher. Doesn’t sound a lot, but we have a steel roof, and a satellite dish close by, so we had to get some benefit from moving it. The aerial is a phased array antenna, which has a very broad pick up pattern, which we need as we don’t quite have line of site on the Baxter’s Knob mast, which is just a couple of km away, but about 30metres of hill between us and it.

It’s also a relatively low power transmitter, so we definitely need an amplifier. So I bought a Hill’s masthead amplifier, which I actually installed just underneath the mast, but in the loft, where I can get to it without putting my life at risk again and again! The amplifier also has a much higher gain than the set side amp, so the signal should be even better and with the bonus that all the other  possible TV locations have an amplified signal too.

As I use a splitter between the TV and the antenna, I had to get up to that, in a different loft space, and change it so the power from the set side amplifier power supply could actually go through to the antenna.

So all set up and tested for power reaching the antenna, I switched on the Freeview box and watched a bit of the usually weak TV One. Perfect, and has been for several hours. The acid test will come when we get a windy day. Just to see how good it was I let the Freeview box tune itself again, and while it was tuning I saw that the signal on one channel (51H – TVNZ) was up around 96% for strength and quality, and on the other channel around 80% on both. So it looks good!

So good, I tried the computer TV card next, where we have been getting pretty miserable TVNZ reception since the last lot of antenna work I did. So far, reception is perfect there also!

So a good result at last – a great looking antenna on the roof (I also removed the UHF antenna while I was up there), a powerful amplifier on the main cable, no horrible amplifier behind the TV, and what looks like very acceptable performance.

So do your worst TV companies, I am now totally ready for when you turn off the analogue TV signal, and I am not paying $20 per week for SKY! Now I just need to get a non CDMA phone, and I am ready for the 21st century.

I ordered an HDMI cable to go between the Freeview box and the HD ready TV, and plugged it in today. This finishes the job off nicely, wonderful reception and images (even on our 32in TV). It also frees up the composite output (and cable) to go back into either the VHS recorder, or the computer or amplifier if required. The cable was $18 delivered from Ascent, compared to a minimum of $40 (and up to $175) for a cable from any of the high street stores.

Not really an SOS post, but technical anyway! We have been experimenting for a year or so with Freeview through the TV card in our Acer Entertainment PC, and despite a couple of different antennas, the latest being a rather swish ‘phased array’ jobby, and also an antenna amplifier, our reception was at best marginal, OK most of the time in Prime, TV3 and C4, but useless for TVNZ stations.  At the weekend, Harvey Norman had a special on Dish TV Aerial Box terrestrial receivers, so we bought one and installed it. Result – perfect reception, even with the antenna amplifier turned down to almost minimum! So our problem was probably in the useless Yuan TV card supplied with the Acer computer, but might be the computer struggling with processing the HD signals.

The freeview box is rather good for the price ($147) having an ethernet connection which allows connection to some Yahoo weather pages, and to some NZ maps, and also includes an email client. It also allows connection of a USB hard drive, which turns it into a reasonably well specced PVR (personal video recorder?), with one touch scheduling of recording from the EPG (electronic program guide), watching as it records etc. It even works with a USB key, but is a bit jerky on playback.

Mini update – still a little bit of drop out on TVNZ stations on windy evenings, but it could be lived with. Will probably raise the antenna a little further and put a mast top amplifier up, just to finish off the installation, and see how that goes.

I have just has an exciting few days. I finally got some time to myself and my new PC, and I have been making it the way I want it. One of the things I wanted was to dual boot into either XP (which I need to drive my vinyl cutter) or Ubuntu. I have spent the last week trying to install a version of Ubuntu, but for some reason could not get any to install except 9.04, and even then if I followed the instructions on the FitPC website I could not get it to work. In the end I installed the vanilla 9.04 and it seemed to work fine! I really wanted something better than 9.04, so I tried upgrading to 9.10, but that failed miserably too.

I was looking through the Ubuntu web sit when I read that version 11.04 will actually update an existing installation from the live CD. This showed promise, so I took the live CD I made of 11.04 downstairs to my 10.10 system, and went through the upgrade process on that machine, which worked great. I then used the built in utility to generate an installable USB version of the 11.04 disk, which I took back up to my FITPC2i (which doesn’t have a bootable CD player). I booted from the 11.04 USB key, and when prompted, told it to upgrade the 9.04 installation. This worked almost perfectly, it hicoughed on the re-application of existing packages, which there probably wasn’t any of with it being a brand new installation. When I booted into the new system, I didn’t have the correct hardware to run the new Unity interface, so I had to run the classic interface. As my first task would have been to switch back to the classic, this was just bonus! A swift bit of work changing the boot order in grub2, and putting in a better colour scheme and making the windows buttons appear on the right, and I had a fully working Ubuntu 11.04 running on my FITPC2i.

Grub2 was a bit of  a problem, I couldn’t get it to boot into Windows by default until I read somewhere that you can specify the default in the /etc/default/grub file as a string field rather than as a number. I got the string from the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file (the title of the OS to boot into).

Had a desperate phone call from a past client a few weeks ago. He could only start Outlook up in safe mode, and in safe mode he could not send emails from word or excel. As he is a builder, and was in the middle of invoicing this was a major problem. I did a bit of research, and found many, many pages on this problem. It seems to happen when the machine shuts down without Outlook quitting properly. There were dozens of solutions, most of which looked a bit iffy, not the sorts of things that you should have to do, and much too complex. After a couple of hours research, I found deeply buried in someones blog I think, this solution. Go looking for a file called OUTCMD.DAT, usually somewhere like  \documents and settings\”user name”\Application Data\microsoft\outlook, and either delete it or rename it. Restart outlook, and everything should be sweet.

So I turned up at the client’s house, and while he was still describing the problem to me, I fixed it! Took about 4 minutes, and he was more than pleased to may my call out fee!

If you look around the web at the blue screen issue with this graphics chip and its drivers, you can see that many people are frustrated by it, myself included. I now have it to the point where it runs perfectly well while the PC is up and running, and it will go into and out of  standby no problem at all so long as there is a monitor attached. However, if my monitor is switched through to another PC using my KVM switch when the FIT PC comes out of sleep mode, its starts up in a horrible 640 by 480 4 colour mode, and eventually blue screens. I thought at first it was the FITVGA adapter, but I think it does it if it is directly connected via the HDMI connector, but the monitor is being used on the VGA connector by another computer. I am still working on a resolution, but don’t hold out a lot of hope until the drivers are fixed.

Lots of technical stuff too, difficult to remember it all.

The biggest item is I finally replaced my aging (10+ years) workshop desktop with something a little different, namely a FIT PC2i. This device is about the size of the box a 70 mm cooling fan comes in, you can see the actual size on the website. While the physical size in not that important, it is nice that it fits on  the shelf above my monitor, next to the router, NAS drive and the external drive. Clear desk, clear foot area under my desk, lovely. More importantly is its power consumption. Flat out it consumes less than 10 watts, in standby its about a single watt. It’s taken me a while to get all the drivers sorted out, but this was complicated by other issues detailed below.

The reason I chose the PC2i was that firstly it has a 2 GHz processor and 2 gigabytes of ram, but also  has a serial port (a really cute mini one), with an adaptor to plug in the serial cable. This means I can run my vinyl cutter off it. The major problems I have had have concerned standby mode and blue screens. The blue screens appear to be an attribute of the drivers for the GMA 500 video chip, but have not happened for a while now, so obviously I have found the right combination of drivers and settings. Coming out of standby, I was having problems with a jerky mouse cursor. In the end I replaced my aging microsoft wireless mouse and keyboard combination with a new logitech MK250 combo, which meant a complete change of drivers etc. I didn’t think this had worked, as I still got a jerky mouse in some cases.

However, this was a red herring, as the issue was now with Firefox 4, which I have been using for a while. It seems that quite a few people out there have been experiencing a jerky mouse after migrating to Firefox 4, and after testing with Google Chrome and IE8, I realised it was my problem also. It looks like I will have to ‘downgrade’ to Firefox 3.6. A client has also been having problems with FF4, in his case using the drop down search bars in AVG and Google search bars, neither of which allow you to actually use any of the entries in the drop down.

Another issue I have dealt with on two recent jobs is the RUNDLL32.EXE problem, where some piece of malware seems to corrupt windows, and leaves it corrupted after it is removed. Until now the only solution I have had for this problem is to  re-install windows, which is still the answer in some cases. However, I had one machine where the usage did not warrant this extreme action, and found another solution. The symptoms, which are basically that no application is found to run the above named file, or any of many applications, only show themselves in a single user of the machine. In this case the ‘Owner’ sign on showed the symptoms both in normal mode and safe mode, but the administrator sign on did not show them at all. Some other symptoms are present in both sign ons, but they are trivial to fix. So the solution is to create a new sign on with the same attributes as the infected one, and copy over the documents, start menus etc from one user to the other, being careful not to copy the windows or application data directories, as these contain whatever the infection is. A little work to get the sign on working properly, delete the old sign on, and bob’s your uncle, a working user sign on!