Posted on

15-Mar-2009

Irene restored
I did run some checks (using Ubuntu LiveCD) on the memory of Irene – the family PC that broke down – and found quite a lot of errors, but I wasn’t sure of the truth of the outcome. It’s new (just a few weeks old) and had run perfectly for some time. So I returned the system to the shop to test it.
Indeed – the added 1Gb memory turned out to be bad. Had it removed and retry to boot – but it seems Windows is capable of making a mess of the disk due to memory errors: the same problem persisted: spontanuous reboot each time the system was booted.
The Ubuntu startup didn’t work either.
SO I had to do some repair: ChkDsk on both Windows disks (system and pagedisk), so at least Windows was bootable again.
The faulty memory was returned to the shop where I bought it, they ran some checks as well but found it defective indeed. So I got a new module, installed it and behold: as if nothing has happened. It seems nothing is lost.
Just Ubuntu needed to be re-installed, but that had nothing to do with failing disks. I think I made an error with assigning the disk priority (which is the “C:” disk can be set in BIOS) and finally I got it re-installed. Only to find that mouse and keyboard didn’t work. I installed an old keyboard and at that moment, it worked. Now to find a new keyboard 😉
WASD weirdness
I have 7 services defined – and I should have a list of 7 checking the services. But for some reason, in time it will be a multiple of 7: some way all 7 are duplicated and I didn’t find out why, yet. I seem to be the only one with the problem…
But to be true, that’s the only problem (apart from the known PHP engine stuff) I run into on Diana….
ATI card problems
For some time, the ATI-based card in Aphrodite – the workstation – fails, returning into a colorfull, stripy type of screen in the normal Windows mode, blacking out and sometimes restarting in the alternate setup, or blackout and power it off under Ubuntu. The only solution is to reset: Attempting to restart under Windows doesn’t work – and I cannot see why, and Ubuntu really hangs – the system is completely ‘dead’ – doesn’t react in any way. It might be set to SLEEP, eventually, but I doubt it – hitting the power butten does not resume but restarts – from BIOS, over GRUB into the selected system. It happens when I have watched movies – .AVI, .WMV, .MPEG, or, more particular, .MP4 – that’s where I first encountered the problem.