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PruritusAni

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Posts posted by PruritusAni

    What Is Your 2011 GOTY?

    in Gaming

    Posted

    Portal 2 without a doubt, and for the same reason as FUZi0N. I couldn't stop playing it, stayed up all night and finished it, all the while yawning and telling myself "ok just one more test". I then did it again the next night. And again a few days later. The wit, the story, the freaking awesome physics everywhere, made the game an amazing experience for me.

     

    I must admit that Skyrim looks very much addictive too, but so far I've managed to not get it. It or MW3 will probably win any GOTY competition with large numbers of voters.

    CPU running a little hot

    in Processors, Motherboards and Memory

    Posted

    I clean all of the processors with q-tips and rubbing alcohol before applying any new TIM. I have been using a tiny bit of Arctic Cooling MX2 for every chip that needed cooling, and it has been great so far. Any other thermal paste would work as long as you remember that the idea is to fill tiny microscopic cracks in the surface of the chip and not to slather the stuff on, so use a little tiny bit. Here's a fairly detailed article on TIMs that you may find relevant.

    ATTN Hotmail users!

    in Software

    Posted

    My school email has received similar emails, but from a hijacked school email account, so it at least had the .edu in there to make it look extra legit.

     

    Here's the last email I received at that email address that made me :lol:

     

    stranger How are you?

    Perhaps you have a question who I am and why I decided to write to you?

    This is Galina. I live in Kazakhstan, I'm 26 years old. girl who wants to

    meet the love of his life. Here where I live, I could not find a decent man.

    So . In the dating agency I was asked to consider a few profiles of men. my

    eyes it on you. Maybe learning more about each other we can have real

    relations. I will be glad if you answer to my proposal of friendship. for

    your answer. And I hope to learn more about you.

    Bye, bye, bye, Galina.

     

     

    she had me at "girl who wants to meet the love of his life" ...

     

    I responded almost at once attaching copies of my social security card, driver's license and passports as well as photos of me in compromising, yet tasteful poses with my banking information. :bow:

    In need of a new mouse

    in Miscellaneous Hardware

    Posted

    I went from the mx518 to the g500 not that long ago, and I must say that now that the transition period is over I truly enjoy my g500. Having used the 518 for so many years it took quite a bit to get used to the feel of the g500 (not to mention all the customization available), but I now prefer it. I don't know how big the change will be from a g5 to a g500, but the g500 is def a sweet mouse. :thumbsup:

    What did you want to be when you grew up?

    in OCC Member's Lounge

    Posted

    Back in 5th grade when I first started programming I was convinced I'd be a programmer for life. It wasn't until 3 years into my CS degree that I got bored with programming. Getting a program to work just didn't bring the same joy to me anymore. I needed something more challenging, and after a failed start in Mathematics I opted for Physics. I'm now en route to my 3rd year in graduate school, studying theoretical particle physics.

     

    Astronaut is bit too dangerous still, give it a century or two, then we may have figured out better ways to do space (and maybe even interstellar!).

    Unnofficial OCC "Pay it Forward" Contest 2!

    in OCC Member's Lounge

    Posted

    I am pleased to report that missed sarcasm aside the ol' college try failed, and it did not take long to do so. Perhaps one ought to give it the ol' grad school try. :teehee:

     

    What do F5 and space have in common? One of them is not even on your swedish keyboard diagram. :P

    They're both centered on a vertical axis that doesn't help at all. (at least reflections don't go anywhere useful, since up down is ill defined on a keyboard)

    The one thing that can develop from looking at the updown direction is additional routes to madness. Shifts in all directions: not just in the same row, but diagonally, and with new areas of "does that count as a character?".

     

    Medbor, your mind is a strange place!

    disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

    in Drives and Storage

    Posted · Edited by PruritusAni

    well while trying to do all sorts of last minute things i decided i'd throw in a flash drive with xubuntu on it. From xubuntu (10.04) I decided i'd inspect the drive in question using 2 different utilities: Disk Utility and GSmartControl. Upon a quick test both report the drive is just fine, no errors nothing!! I've even went to run a read only benchmark which it did quite well in, no errors here either!

     

     

    Finally I transplant it into mom's computer where upon being run as the boot drive it produces the same blinking cursor that does nothing. :pfp:

    When I use mom's drive as the boot, it recognizes it, and proceeds to tell me that I need to format the disk before using it.

     

    So I suppose at this point I admit defeat, but I'd like to reclaim my data from it. I'll experiment with a few things but I can't say I'm too hopeful at this point.

     

     

    This is definitely one of the weirdest and maddening errors I've ever encountered. I just wish I knew what I did, so I can avoid doing it again.

     

     

     

    UPDATE: I tried Active Partition Recovery, had it fix the boot sector on the drive and it seemed to have done something! I now can access that drive on my mom's computer. My computer on the other hand is unmoved, so it's displaying that blinking cursor still when I try to boot from it.

     

    So I decided to connect my backup drive to mom's computer as well, to recover all of my stuff. Nevertheless this drive is also broken?!?!? and a scan by partition recovery revealed 4 partitions labeled Bad, Very Bad, Very Bad and Very Bad. I am now running a long scan to see if maybe i can recover it. More later

     

     

     

    UPDATE 2: Well it seems as though i am able to recover files off the drive. There is however a catch: they are not at all labeled by their original names but instead are called things like:

     

    Recovered mp3 file 41743836836969.mp3

    Recovered text file 2491239478129.txt

     

    and so on. There seems to be no folder structure left, and everything is piled together haphazardly in the Lost Files folder.

     

    This of course is going to make the recovery process near to impossible, as I'd have to rename a trillion things over the course of the next few years. I'd be better off not even worrying about it at this point.

     

    I found a few externals that had a good portion of the files/folders on there, and i have access to the boot drive, which had a good portion of the back up stuff on there.

     

    I guess I'll reinstall windows 7 on the new drive I ordered today and hope that i'll never have to deal with this sort of nonsense again.

     

    Thanks all for your help.

    disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

    in Drives and Storage

    Posted

    UPDATE: Well I came back home and memtest ran a bunch of tests 5 and 8 while I was at school finding no errors. So the memory is not at fault here, leaving me with the last option of trying the drive in my mom's computer.

     

    As an interesting aside I found some info on this 5672 error thrown by SpinRite:

     

    Just to let folks know that may come across this error. So, I figured out the problem! Keep a close eye on the cylinder counter in the second screen. You'll notice that once it hits 65535 it crashes on the next count! The storage register used in SpinRite for the cylinder counter is 16 bits wide. So, in disks with cylinder counts greater than 64k (2^16) will fail with this error! It is such a small fix in the program that I'm shocked that no update has been released. Specially with the typical sizes of HDD these days. Shame on you Steve Gibson and the GRC folks!

     

    So as it turns out this error doesn't really mean much in the way of the disk's health. So now I must find a program that does the job SpinRite was supposed to do, but right. Do you have any recommendations?

     

    I'll update again after dinner and the attempt involving mom's computer.

    disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

    in Drives and Storage

    Posted · Edited by PruritusAni

    Last night while busy being awful at Counterstrike I was on the receiving end of a massive BSOD. I scrambled for paper and pen to write some of the stuff down but the computer shut down before i could write down anything. I thought nothing of it, and decided to go to sleep instead. Tonight, upon an attempt to restart the computer I was greeted by this:

    disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

     

    So I fired up the ol' Google machine and found out that this problem is one of those. No one seems to know what causes it, and furthermore no one seems to agree on how to fix it. I did find a lot of possible solutions and have tried some of them:

     

    Things I've tried:

    1) change the SATA port and cable for the drive, make sure it's still the boot disk in the BIOS and restart. ==> No DIce

    2) reset BIOS to defaults, make sure the disk drive is the boot disk even if in port 4. CLRTC jumper action ==> I now get this:

    DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

     

    So I obeyed the lovely error message and:

     

    3) tried running Startup Repair and after it did its thing it said:

     

    To restart immediately, click Finish. If repairs were successful, Windows will start correctly. If repairs were not successful, Startup Repair might run again to continue fixing your computer.

     

    and clicking on the diagnosis and repair details found:

    Number of repair attempts:1

     

    Tests performed:

    Check for updates

    System disk test

    Disk failure diagnosis

    Disk metadata test

     

    All completed successfully. Error code = 0x0

     

    Root cause found:

    The partition table does not have a valid System Partition.

     

    Repair action: Partition table repair.

    Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0

     

    This sounded pretty hopeful, so I hit finish to restart and removed the win 7 disk out of the drive. The computer starts, flashes the POST at me as it always does and presents me with a blinking cursor. That does nothing, typing anything at it doesn't do anything and the only key combination that works is CtrlAltDel.

     

    So at this point I fire the win 7 disk up again, and try some other things:

    4 ) try to run CHKDSK /R /P from a console i was able to start up in the repair. It tells me that /P is an invalid parameter so I try it with just /R

     

    The type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive. Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected.

     

    I try it again without /R and it runs amazingly quickly, with:

     

    3086 kb total disk space.

     

    there was more to that output, but 3086 kb of total disk space coupled with X:\Sources> being my command prompt told me that it was not going to get me anywhere. So going down the list of crazy things to try from the internets:

     

    5) try to run FIXBOOT from the console. I am told that fixboot doesn't exist.

     

    6) try to run FIXMBR from the console. I am told that FIXMBR doesn't exist.

     

    So I restart the machine again, and this time after the POST flashes through in its usual way I'm faced with the same blinking cursor from above.

     

    I'm feeling pretty aggravated by this point so in an act of "maybe it'll work?":

     

    7) I am now running Spinrite's level 2 on the disk over night.

     

    I'll update in the morning upon waking, but in the meantime as I'd like to keep my drive I turn to you:

    Have any of you battled this before? How did you fare in the battle? Any hints, tips, suggestions appreciated.

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