Thursday, January 17, 2008

Drill has arrived

In my last post I had mentioned something about improving the airflow in my computer cabinet and that i was gonna cut/drill some holes to fit some fans on the side panel.
Now in continuation of that story.
I had enquired about the drilling process with some engineering shops nearby. They said something like 2 Rs for every hole to be drill. I needed space for three fans and provision of all three sizes of fans 80mm, 92mm and 120mm on those. These itseld made up 48 holes. And we have not even started on the holes for the air to go in /out. That would asily be some 2-3 hundred holes. At that cost I could buy a drill set for myself.
And thats what i have done. I searched around the net for a home delivery type of drill set. Between indiatimes and rediff this drill from the same vendor was costing different. Maybe the typist or policies are different for the two sites.
OK so after a wait of about 10 days my drill set has arrived. Surprishingly lightweight package. One drill , pliers, wrench, screwdriver set, tape measure, drill bits 5 of each type(wood metal and something else). Nice package. Everyone should have one. Everything stays at one place and is easily accessible. No searching around.
So this week end i will be destroying the side panel of the cabinet by trial and error to do y personal cabinet modification. I also need to order some scythe fans from ABGB. Rally nice fans . No noise at all.
My fish tank filter/ Air pump make more noise that my CPU :)

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Upgrading BIOS of CROSSHAIR motherboard

Today I finally updated the BIOS. I wanted to to do this since I got the computer but the ASUS site was not opening up the downloads page for CROSSHAIR.
Now after so many day of waiting I have finally got the new BIOS. The idea being that any product or software ships with bugs and they are sorted out as time progresses. I am a software engineer and I know how software's are made. Basically, the makers/manufacturers decide based on the severity of the bugs remaining and the degree of testing done whether to release the software or not. Rest are handled as updates. Also manufacturers cant simulate every possible scenario in which the product will be used.
The latest version of BIOS as of today was 904. 905 was also there as a BETA but I am using the release version. Next I downloaded the ASUS update utility from Asus site to update the bios.
I tried using the EzFlash option from he BIOS itself but the thing wasn't showing my file correctly and was displaying garbage characters. Not to take that risk, I tried it with ASUS update utility. Even after downloading the latest one from the site , the little bugger found even more latest version of itself on asus site and spent a lot of time comfortably downloading it. The latest version now being 7.13.04.
Even though this version of ASUS update does not say its compatibility with Vista. I decided to use it anyway with the reason explained above.
The upgrade progressed nicely without much trouble. I had closed all other programs before I went into this.
It asked for the machine to be restarted. It restarted. I checked the setup to see any visible changes but couldn't find any.
So after the BIOS update, next few things to do for me would be:
  • Find the maximum overclocking limit of my machine. 6000+ @ 3Mhz now
  • Drill fan holes in the side panel door to fit three big fans. for cooling the motherboard-CPU.
Right now the air gets trapped inside when the door is closed and temperature crosses 60C. Though not very high, I would like to reduce it. The fans I am gonna fit is 120mm Scythe S-Flex 63 CFM. I already have two and I am gonna get some more. Super silent and mighty efficient.
My ThermalRight 120 extreme is helping a lot bit in moving heat away from the processor but it need to go out of cabinet also. Power supply doesn't feel things to be hot enough to speed up its fan. Those Corsair guys put some hot material in 620HX.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Vista not booting "bootmgr compressed" I can compress it but cant read it later

Superb thing happened to me the other day
I have installed Vista on my system drive which was only 10 GB in size, So i am always short on space since beginning. After moving all the optional things like pagefile and index location i am able to fit vista in there.
So for freeing up some space i compressed my system drive . It gave some warning regarding this but i ignored them. Very stupid thing as it turned out.
So after the days work(??) i switched off the computer and went to sleep.
Next the comp refused to boot stating that the bootmgr(a file it uses to boot) is compressed and it does not like the boot files to be touched and advised me to press ALT+CTRL+DEL to restart the comp.
Now everybody and their kids know the ALT+CTRL+DEL restarts the comp, and how is this thing gonna improve the situation is not stated. Carrying out the order takes us back to the same message. Some helpful(recursive) message this.
Now some net searching about this revealed it to be a very generic and unsolved problem. It plagues both XP and Vista it seems. They ask permission for useful things like defrag an scandisk but allow such a destructive operation to be carried out by anyone.
The solution to this as i found out here
was :
compact /u c:\bootmgr
compact /u c:\ntldr
from the command prompt thru XP or Vista recovery console by booting from the XP ot vista install disk.
I got to the point of entering the password for windows but failed there since i dont use password for my login and dont remember any password i might have entered while installing.
Then i tried to change the compressed drive parameter from Ubuntu but it does not seem to have any option for that.
How do you undo an operation
Best way to undo any operation is to reverse the steps done. Right.
So i took my hard disk to friends place, Attached it there, ran the above commands for my drive and also by the GUI to be sure about it.
Came back . Started comp and it STARTED.
So much excitement for a very silly thing to do . I mean when you are so short of space that you have to compress entire drive, its best to get a new hard disk.
I really need to get two HDD and get them working in RAID 0 very soon now.

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