[ReaperMan]

Damn you Firefox UPDATES! Now i have to fix my customizations again.

[Master Fibbles]

The last man to be killed in WWI was a Canadian, if I remember correctly from my random knowledge.

[High Treason]

Apparently, I am running FireFox 14... I don't even remember upgrading from Version 3 but oh well - security isn't much concern as this machine only visits my e-mail, YouTube and this forum.

None of it matters now anyway, about 11 years ago I learned a valuable lesson: Always back things up! Not relevant to you? Probably not, but it's relevant to me right now. Around 17 years of files just went bye bye. Did I back it up? Yeah, sure, I just didn't plan on FOUR out of SIX hard drives failing at the same time. Fuck Windows 7, Fuck Intel's Core 2, Fuck the ICH9 and P35, nothing but trouble. Various drive recovery software (Including free, cheap and a very expensive one I purchased a few years back) cannot access the drives either and I am now left with this single XP partition booting but it's days are numbered as the taskbar warns me constantly that "C:\MFT{:content:}quot; cannot be written to and it's pointless without the RAID array up anyway.

I can't afford a new machine, looks like I'm back where I was a few months ago and I just about give up. Ain't as important to me as it was, as long as I've got the internet to keep up with stuff every so often and watch a few random videos I am happy, it's all I need a machine to do, but I'm pissed that all my files are gone - among them an animated series I have been working on for ten years. GuessI'll get a shitty i3 rig at some point when I can afford it, throw Win 8 on it and just deal with it, there's nothing else I can do.


May add that the remaing two drives might be screwed too, just that I can't see them in XP because of a bug in Intel's RAID drivers. Those two are only used short term anyway, they are RAID0 and hold uncompressed video when it is recorded, it is erased once the files have been used - nothing I want to keep on those. If hey are working they will be used to back up the most important things from the other drives (Maybe in RAID1) if those start playing ball so they aren't useless yet.

[Person of Color]

So wait, your Southbridge failed and corrupted your drives? Or did your power supply fail and knock shit out?

If they can't even be detected at POST just buy some used ones that are the same model off eBay and switch the controller boards.

[High Treason]

Maybe, no idea, that's two boards with the same chipset, same OS and same CPU arc that have exhibited this behaviour. The other one I just didn't care about as it has nothing on it - plus that one has a cheapo Seagate drive so I wasn't sure with it. The four that failed in the big box are high-end WD's - generally very reliable drives.


All I know is it was working, I shut Win7 down to fire up XP and got bombarded with "* on Drive X: is corrupt, run CHKDSK" - I have not run CHKDSK and refuse to allow it at start as that would screw up the recovery process, as it is the drives have become completely inaccessible.

I only have two machines that can use drives this large though, this Q84 and the E82, both of which have garbled their drives so aren't reliable - and cannot access these drives. I only know one person with a machine advanced enough to plug them into (everyone seems to have tablets or at best, netbooks these days) but I'm weary of putting anything in his machine knowing about the PCI-E slots in it having problems and a known to be failing chipset sitting on the motherboard.


Edit: They are detected at POST and can be seen in the RAID BIOS. Drive letters still appear too. The recovery software wants none of it, everything I try just gets a little way through the drive and crashes or claims to be out of memory, interestingly the most expensive one I have refuses to even start an attempt at recovery, claims the drive is dead and switches the machine off.

I know about the controller board trick, I doubt it would do anything here. Had to do that for an "Excelstor" drive - yeah, who the hell - took ten damn years to find that. That was the drive that taught me to back stuff up in the first place. Also it still didn't work though I was past really caring about the contents of that one by then anyway.

[Person of Color]

Buy a cheap PCI-E SATA card for like $20 and just see if you can read the data.

You know what I would do? Sell some of your old rare stuff and build an actual machine with an i5 or an 83xx.

[Person of Color]

You wanna talk crappy chipsets, look at the Nvidia 750i SLi in Jimmy's PC. Holyyyyy hell I hated working with that thing. Took me a week of tweaking to get a stable overclock on it. The machine could pass Prime95 for like 12 hours but the moment you tried to put any kind of load on the PCI-E bus it would shit it's pants unless you dropped the memory frequency and upped the voltage and fucked with a bunch of settings. Plus the damn thing ran so fucking hot you could cook an egg on the giant chipset heatsink.

Also the fucking thing was released in 2008 and totally lacks AHCI and only the x16 slots are PCI-E 2.0, all the rest are 1.0. And those 2.0 slots use a bridge chip that goes to a 1.0 based northbridge. Total fucking hackjob.

Good computer though. But fuck overclocking that thing, seriously.

[High Treason]

I'm in the process of starting to sell things off, I have to eat. I suppose I could grab a shitty SATA card though, down-side is these are the only PCI-E capable machines I have.

I aspired to a Xeon system but there's no point running anything more than a Core i3 by now, at the end of the day what am I going to do with it? It'll run a browser and a flash player, do simple audio and video capture/editing, I mean the Pentium D did it all just fine so the i3 should be an improvement theoretically... These Core 2's weren't, very very unstable and slow in a video editing environment, they were good at games though - and I think an i3 coule probably handle The Sims just fine too which is about the only game I ever run now, otherwise I just start a DOS system up.

Otherwise I agree with the reccomendation, i5 is a good value chip IMO, i7's aren't worth the extra cost.

Edit: nVidia made chipsets that late? I always thought they'd give up after the nForce 2 disaster, and the nForce 3 disaster, and the nForce 4 disaster... I see a pattern here.

[Forge]

ReaperMan, on 09 May 2014 - 06:10 PM, said:

Damn you Firefox UPDATES! Now i have to fix my customizations again.

classic theme restorer 1.1.8 addon

High Treason, on 09 May 2014 - 07:12 PM, said:

otherwise I just start a DOS system up.

put Debian Linux on one of those drives. probably be able to get the data off the other drives with it afterwards.

Protected by Viper, on 09 May 2014 - 07:05 PM, said:

You wanna talk crappy chipsets, look at the Nvidia 750i SLi in Jimmy's PC. Holyyyyy hell I hated working with that thing.

I had a HP with a nForce 770i SLi a few comps back. Horrid piece of shit.
Got it because I didn't know better and it had alot of room for expansion.
Little did i know that no matter how many upgrades i tossed into it, it still crawled like it had nowhere to go in a hurry.
Pulled my 9800 gtx+ out of it and threw it as far as i could after the controllers finally burnt out.
I don't even think it lasted two years.
Hated HP after that and migrated to Asus

[Jeff]

Protected by Viper, on 09 May 2014 - 07:05 PM, said:

Took me a week of tweaking to get a stable overclock on it.

They've come a long way with overclocking. I only know the basics, and I just opened my BIOS, changed a few settings (BCLK, multiplier, and voltage) and it's all set. Asus boards (probably others too) have an auto tuning tool, which will overclock the system for you based on your hardware setup.

Back in the day, I never overclocked anything.

[Hendricks266]

ReaperMan, on 09 May 2014 - 06:10 PM, said:

Damn you Firefox UPDATES!

Pale Moon

High Treason, on 09 May 2014 - 06:43 PM, said:

Apparently, I am running FireFox 14...

Pale Moon

[Forge]

Hendricks266, on 09 May 2014 - 07:41 PM, said:

Pale Moon

Probably the best option anymore for an alternate browser.
Iceweasel hasn't updated their windows package since last september

Jeff, on 09 May 2014 - 07:25 PM, said:

Asus boards (probably others too) have an auto tuning tool, which will overclock the system for you

"turbo mode" is for sissies.
It's like taking the scooter when the motor bike is sitting right there

[Lunick]

[Jimmy]

Protected by Viper, on 09 May 2014 - 07:05 PM, said:

You wanna talk crappy chipsets, look at the Nvidia 750i SLi in Jimmy's PC. Holyyyyy hell I hated working with that thing. Took me a week of tweaking to get a stable overclock on it. The machine could pass Prime95 for like 12 hours but the moment you tried to put any kind of load on the PCI-E bus it would shit it's pants unless you dropped the memory frequency and upped the voltage and fucked with a bunch of settings. Plus the damn thing ran so fucking hot you could cook an egg on the giant chipset heatsink.

Also the fucking thing was released in 2008 and totally lacks AHCI and only the x16 slots are PCI-E 2.0, all the rest are 1.0. And those 2.0 slots use a bridge chip that goes to a 1.0 based northbridge. Total fucking hackjob.

Good computer though. But fuck overclocking that thing, seriously.

Love you, babe.

[Person of Color]

High Treason, on 09 May 2014 - 07:12 PM, said:

Edit: nVidia made chipsets that late? I always thought they'd give up after the nForce 2 disaster, and the nForce 3 disaster, and the nForce 4 disaster... I see a pattern here.

The nForce2 was great dude. That was a godsend for AMD owners ten years ago.

Forge, on 09 May 2014 - 07:17 PM, said:

I had a HP with a nForce 770i SLi a few comps back. Horrid piece of shit.
Got it because I didn't know better and it had alot of room for expansion.
Little did i know that no matter how many upgrades i tossed into it, it still crawled like it had nowhere to go in a hurry.
Pulled my 9800 gtx+ out of it and threw it as far as i could after the controllers finally burnt out.
I don't even think it lasted two years.
Hated HP after that and migrated to Asus

Yeah Nvidia chipsets aren't known for their reliability.

Jeff, on 09 May 2014 - 07:25 PM, said:

They've come a long way with overclocking. I only know the basics, and I just opened my BIOS, changed a few settings (BCLK, multiplier, and voltage) and it's all set. Asus boards (probably others too) have an auto tuning tool, which will overclock the system for you based on your hardware setup.

Back in the day, I never overclocked anything.

Yeah auto tuning sucks and Haswell is trickier than Sandy/Ivy.

[High Treason]

The nForce 2 was great - when it worked properly. I never knew anyone get the SATA working on them (which I suspect was bridged to the IDE controller) and they had serious power problems. Nobody I know of actually got one to run stably, especially with bigger CPU's like the 2600+ upwards, they just couldn't handle it, though some of that was probably down to mobo companies under-powering stuff.

There was one interesting thing with the nF2, if you had an SB-Compatible card, whether hardware of software based, the chipset would intercept the signal to it and it would never reach the card... Where it DID go I never found out as there were no side effects to this whatsoever aside from there being no sound in the application. This was another reason I ditched that, plus the LeadTek and DFI boards I had were total crap and if DFI couldn't make it work back then, it wasn't really worth bothering with if you were into gaming.

Also, I've made progress. Free software, Recuva can actually access the drive. Screw all that paid for crap, waste of money.

[Lunick]

[Fox]

[Fox]

Hendricks266, on 09 May 2014 - 07:41 PM, said:

Pale Moon

Good bye, Firefox.

[Ivan Jäger]

i knew it was only a matter of time

[Lunick]

Ivan Dragunov, on 10 May 2014 - 03:46 AM, said:

i knew it was only a matter of time

I think that is gmDoom playing with Half-Life 2's level within Garry's Mod http://steamcommunit...s/?id=133300986

[Forge]

Fox, on 10 May 2014 - 02:53 AM, said:

Good bye, Firefox.

enjoy it while you can.

browser young: nice and streamlined, everything fast and smooth
browser middle-aged: getting quite popular, add some features for security and start a decent addon library for user customization
browser old: bloated turd, updates features it wants - not what the end user wants, a million useless addons, turned into the garbage it was initially trying to give people an option to avoid
ditch this crap and get something new
repeat

typical cycle commencing in 3...2...

[The Commander]

Ivan Dragunov, on 10 May 2014 - 03:46 AM, said:

i knew it was only a matter of time

That Mod for Garry's Mod is almost a year old now.

[Person of Color]

High Treason, on 09 May 2014 - 09:41 PM, said:

The nForce 2 was great - when it worked properly. I never knew anyone get the SATA working on them (which I suspect was bridged to the IDE controller) and they had serious power problems. Nobody I know of actually got one to run stably, especially with bigger CPU's like the 2600+ upwards, they just couldn't handle it, though some of that was probably down to mobo companies under-powering stuff.

They didn't have native SATA, that was always provided by a third party chip (Usually Silicon Image).

They worked fine with bigger CPU's. A 3200+ drains less power than the original Palomino core Athlon XP.

I ran multiple Sound Blasters with mine and never had an issue.

[Fox]

Oh, so it's not 100% fake...

[Ivan Jäger]

japanese gone crazy

[Fox]

[High Treason]

Update on the file recovery; Total failure. All six drives are inaccessible to any other system or OS at this point. I think I've gone and lost the last 17 years worth of stuff; my book, my scripts, every video ever made that I still had a copy of, my photos, my music, my music, my porn, everything.

Oh, well, that's that I guess. Just have to live with it. Sucks.


I went into town this evening, didn't do much, stood around some place where the music was far too loud, stared at a rather boring television and drank water because it didn't cost anything... Knocked some guys beer over and I think I offended a few people too, but that's their problem.

Protected by Viper, on 10 May 2014 - 10:59 AM, said:

They didn't have native SATA, that was always provided by a third party chip (Usually Silicon Image).

They worked fine with bigger CPU's. A 3200+ drains less power than the original Palomino core Athlon XP.

I ran multiple Sound Blasters with mine and never had an issue.

Sorry, man, but that's rubbish and you know it is - aside from the third party SATA and I stated as much myself, though later models did have integrated controllers. Either that or you were extremely lucky and somehow avoided some serious design issues with the chipset. There are many well¹ known issues.

¹ This was known to happen with fixed boards with 200 MHz processors.

[Person of Color]

It's not rubbish, those problems either aren't Nvidia's fault or are totally unimportant (or in the case of that kmixer link, totally vague). Leaving a required jumper off a design isn't Nvidia's fault. As for SB compatibility not working, who cares? Those systems were terrible for legacy gaming. They were way too fast.

Look, I've got a few years on you. I was a system builder at the time the nForce2 was around. Everything I designed for others or built myself had either an NF2 or a high end SiS chipset I forget the name of. I even have an Asus A7N8XE Deluxe that still works. If you're really gonna tell me it was a "disaster" then you probably weren't really into computers at the time.

As for the SATA controller, only bleeding edge NF2 boards shipped with that southbridge. Most lacked SATA or had third party controllers. It was first gen SATA tech. You honestly expect it to work? I mean, the NF4 SATA problems were inexcusable by then, but this was brand new tech, and back then most drives didn't even have a SATA controller but bridge chips that interfaced with what was an IDE controller board.

[High Treason]

The number of years you have done something is irrelevant, but if you want me to go down that route; When that motherboard was relevant I was managing a network that supported 1000 clients, I wasn't getting paid and it was mostly voluntary, but it sure taught me a lot. I personally don't think faults that halt the machine often, cause software to not work or render the board unuseable are unimportant or vague, I think they are quite obviously a serious problem and if they are vague a quick Google search will turn up many archives of people suffering with them back then, possibly even me.


I had two nF2 boards, they were terrible, as for the blame;

Quote

though some of that was probably down to mobo companies under-powering stuff

I stated as much already. You trying to start an argument or some shit? Sure looks like it and I can't be bothered. The fact of the matter is, that whether it was nVidia's fault or not, those motherboards simply didn't work very well. None of those boards I had still work.

Too fast? Now that simply isn't true, if you want to run games like Blood at higher resolutions you'll need something like that - plus I could only have access to one machine at a time back then so it had to do everything, not everyone was/is running a computer the same way or for the same reasons you are. My current Athlon XP is the best system I have for games like that, though that one is on the older VIA KT133 and has an ISA slot negating the need for emulation.

I think the fact that very few motherboards still working today use the nForce 2, but there are certainly many VIA and SiS boards in operation, is a testament to the problems that nForce 2 boards had.

So what can we surmise? The boards were expensive, unstable, poorly designed, poorly made, had compatibility issues and didn't last as long as the alternatives, not good in my opinion. If you liked them, power to you, I'm not going to try and stop you, but they didn't work for me and it seems they didn't work for a lot of other people.

I'd like to add that I never used SATA back then as I deemed it was a waste of money, but every board I went near that had it back then either had or would develop serious issues very quickly. If I am sold a feature I expect it to be operable, whether I want it or not. What if I need it later? I never wanted the second Ethernet port, but I've needed it. Never wanted the extra RAM slots, but due to software requirements I've needed them, imagine if they didn't work? Wouldn't be very good would it? No, it wouldn't.