The Hippo Techo Blog

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Not a usual occurrence but I had a situation where a faulty appliance (an iron actually) managed to kill the PC's, etc.

Naturally as XP booted up again it went into the ol' "check disks for inconsistencies" routine. A number of partitions required checking and all went OK but the I: drive had a problem where the three normal checks (Files,Indexes & Security Descriptors) completed OK but then the system would just hang.

The Event Viewer showed an entry -

Type: Error Event ID: 55 Source: ntfs Category: Disk

Description: The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run chkdsk utility on volume I:

Symbolic Name: IO_FILE_SYSTEM_CORRUPT_WITH_NAME

Checking the Disk Management applet showed the partition to be healthy.

Since chkdsk on boot up wasn't working I thought I'd use Partition Magic 8.0 to test the partition - a few errors were found and fixed.

Tried to boot XP and still faulty.

I reformatted the I: partition with PM (luckily this was a spare partition).

Tried to boot XP and still faulty.

Back to chkdsk from command line - from RUN>CMD I did chkntfs I: and got "Disk is dirty" so then used chkdsk /x and then /R to no avail.

Tried SeaTools diagnostics and the partition wasn't a recognised type so couldn't test it.

My final shot was to try the format from the XP Disk Management applet and remarkably it did the trick.

The PC booted without a hitch.

Unfortunately this just confirms my fear that there are two ways of formatting an XP NTFS partition - Microsoft's and everybody elses's

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The card was installed into the P3 OK (to use with iPod/iTunes combo) but when the PC was shut down it would just restart again.

Mobo: Gigabyte GA-6VXE+ Award BIOS 4.51PG

Card: Belkin F5U508ea 3x FW/ 3x USB 2.0 PCI

The problem appeared to be with the PME setting in the BIOS.

I set -

PME Event Wake Up - Disabled

and the issue was resolved.

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Card purchased with 1.00.0.20 BIOS

Overall setup:

System config:
Abit IS7 with 2 x 512M DRAM
PowerColor 9100 Radeon 128M video
2940 PCI SCSI with Canon FS4000US scanner, Microtek E6 scanner & 100M Zip drive
HP9100 R/W CDROM
1x 40M IDE Master disk
1x 120M IDE Slave disk
2x 80M IDE Slave disks on Promise card

Installed card and XP detected card OK. The drivers installed fine however during system reboot got -
Detecting ... then
No Device is Found
BIOS is not installed!

Had an issue with the Radeon 9100 card failing with -
This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use (code 12). If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system.

Also noticed that the 2940 SCSI card (and associated scanner devices) had dropped out of the Device Manager.
Seems that the Promise card being added messed up the other SCSI card and the Radeon.

PCI Slot 2 Promise TX2Plus card
PCI Slot 3 2940 SCSI card

Decided to upgrade TX2Plus BIOS.
Followed readme.txt -

pflashb8 /f 375BIOS.BIN and got -
EMM386: unrecoverable privileged operation error #1 press enter to reboot.

Needed to rem out the EMM references in config.sys of boot disk and then BIOS upgrade worked OK. (1.00.0.24) This allowed the IDE drives on the TX2Plus to be detected and setup OK (they are set for SLAVE working).
I have also moved the 2940 card to PCI Slot 4

At the moment Radeon seems OK and the 2940 is good.

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A configuration that seems to work OK is -

Canon FS4000US on external SCSI 25 pin port with Microtek E6 plugged into 2nd port on FS4000US.
A 100M ZIP drive is connected to the internal 50 pin port.
Under XP with this config the FS4000US doesn't identify as an FS4000 but using the supplied driver CD will be OK. The E6 actually gives multiple entries in Device Manager but works OK. (This must be an XP quirk since it was OK on Win 2K)

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HAL type for P3 was Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC
HAL type for P4 was ACPI Multiprocessor PC

Set PC to boot from CD and used the XP Pro CD
Select Setup Windows
Accept the license terms
Setup scanned for existing install of windows and located the existing copy on C:
Select the Repair option
Setup renewed the appropriate files and re-enumerated the HAL. The regional settings, etc were set up during the setup sequence as per normal.
After the final reboot the old desktop appeared and all the previously installed apps seemed to work.

The Device Manager contained c. 8 Unknown Devices entries under Other Devices
Used Uninstall option to remove the entries
Did a right click on Computer in DM and did a Scan for Hardware Changes
The devices reappeared mostly named and drivers installed as appropriate.
All in all the process seemed to work well and I didn't need to use the NTBackup that I did on the P3. As usual most of the hassle is in finding out which devices the Unknown Device entries relate to so the appropriate drivers can be supplied.

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These are quite choice little machines. However I did find that I couldn't get the USB connection to work on my P4 running XP and Abit IS7 mobo (I used the USB 1.0 connectors too).

Problem: I would plug in the USB cable and the display would show the firmware and memory as per usual and then start playing the tracks. Funnily enough the USB connection was OK most of the time on my old PIII running XP. The MP3016W was running 2_19WE firmware.

There is a later load of firmware (2_22WE) available on the Daisy Multimedia site (www.daisymm.com) which seems to fix this issue. I can only think that it was related to the USB hardware since both the PC's were running on XP. The firmware load also improves operation with USB 2.0 connectors which most P4 mobo's have in spades.

To do the update -

Copy software.sys file to the players internal memory (eject the CF).

Switch off the unit.

Press and hold down the Vol up, Vol down and Play buttons.
The display will show PROG and a timer indicator
then show READ and a timer indicator and finally
will show DONE (takes about 1-2 mins).

Seems to run SanDisk 256MB CF and Transcend 512MB 45x CF OK

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Not really a bug but annoying - this involves my favourite email client which happens to be Mozilla Mail - why can I not delete an attachment? It seems to me that it makes good sense to be able to save the body texts and discard unwanted attachments. I tend to want to save particular attachments to others areas of the filing system rather than end up with a bloated mail cache in the Mail client.

STOP PRESS: Thunderbird looks like being the saviour with an extension called Attachment Tools that allows deleting, etc of attachments -

www.supportware.net/mozilla/#ext9

Even more STOP PRESS: Thunderbird 1.5 supports the deletion of attachments - brilliant!

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Straight forward install but when an entry for the guestbook was submitted I got the error -

Warning: gethostbyaddr(): Address is not a valid IPv4 or IPv6 address in /home/wanderin/public_html/guestbook/index.php on line 1214

Everything worked OK but the Warning being displayed was annoying however.

To get around the issue an @ was placed in the failing line which in effect forces PHP to suppress the error codes.

$new_remotehost = @gethostbyaddr($new_ipaddress);

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... the ordinal 36 could not be located in the dynamic link library MAPI32.dll

This error pops up when clicking an email link on a website. This was on a system running XP with OE not installed. The mail client happens to be Mozilla Mail and the problem occurred when using Mozilla Firefox. The problem seems to occur when the browser being used is not set as the default browser (the default browser was Mozilla 1.6) with associated mail client.

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This problem had me going for a while - a javascript image mouseover wasn't working, all I would get was an error "missing ; before statement" in the Javascript Console.

The result was I had used ) instead of } at the end of line 3 (need glasses....)

1 <td width="33%"><a href="flinks.html" img border="0"
2 onMouseOver="if(document.images){document.backpage.src= 'images/bbpon220w.gif'}"
3 onMouseOut="if(document.images){document.backpage.src= 'images/bbpoff220w.gif'}"
4 <img name="backpage" src="images/bbpoff220w.gif" alt="Goto Next Page" width="220" height="72" border="0"></a></td>