RE: Fun weekend

[Jean-Claude Gervais <jc dot gervais at videotron dot ca>]

Really cool post-mortem Harold!

I've also got an 80GB HD (UDMA) and a Radeon All-In-Wonder (but the older
model)

And yeah, been there, done that too!

When Windows gets in a funk like that, there isn't a whole lot to do.

If I remember correctly though, you can run Regedit in DOS mode and make
changes to the registry.

At least you could, some time ago; MS had built Regedit with a DOS-mode stub
that could spit the registry out to a textfile or read a text file and apply
the changes in it to the system registry.

This stub is usually a little program that says "This program requires
Microsoft Windows to run", but you can actually use a different stub (of
your own creation) if you want to when you build your app.

Anyhow, I'm not sure if even that could have saved you  :-O


-----Original Message-----
From: cygwin-xfree-owner@cygwin.com [mailto:cygwin-xfree-owner@cygwin.com]On
Behalf Of Harold L Hunt II
Sent: Monday, November 04, 2002 11:08 AM
To: cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com
Subject: Fun weekend

This weekend was interesting.

On Saturday I picked up a Samsung SyncMaster 191T, using the funds that
have been donated by the generous Cygwin/XFree86 supporters (I also
chipped in a substantial amount of money on my own, for anyone keeping
score :)  This gives me a nice readable display and it replaces the
hideous 15 inch LCD that I had caused two permanent vertical lines (one
blue, one yellow) by not wiping off the windex before it ran down under
the bezel (stupid, stupid me).  I hated looking at the monitor because
it reminded me of my own stupidity.  :)

I then ran back to the store and picked up an ATI All In Wonder Radeon
8500 DV since it has a DVI-I output.  This was necessary because I was
getting some interference patterns when running in 1280x1024 with the
analog DB-15 input.  The DVI input cleared up the interference
completely and my display is now beautifuly.  However, getting the
display to work perfectly took about 8 hours, as it was dropping frames
when playing DVDs (the motion was extremely jerky) and recording video
was dropping tons of frames as well.  I was misled by the ATI
documentation and utilities into thinking that this was either due to a
misconfiguration of the hard drive interface (i.e., UDMA may not be
enabled) or due to a poorly synchronized clock on my sound card (which
is used for decoding the audio).  I stumbled upon the correct solution,
more on that below, after an entire day of poking around.  I thought
that the solution was the hard drive drivers, but I was wrong.

Anyway, on Sunday morning I booted up the machine, after having spent
all of Saturday and Saturday night until 3:00 AM configuring it.
 Windows reported that WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM could not be found.
 Great.  I ran setup to a repair, but setup could not find my Windows
installation.  So, I ran the recovery console.  All of my data was still
there, but chkdsk reported errors.  This totally agrees with the fact
that running some executables over the past two weeks would completely
lock the machine.  These executables were most likely corrupt.  In any
case, I needed a new hard drive.  (Luckily, I could copy data from the
damaged drive to the Zip drive).

I returned to the store again and bought an 80 GB Western Digital HD.  I
reinstalled Windows 2000, only to find that the drive letter assigned to
the new drive was F and the old drive was C.  So, I changed the old
drive to C, and reinstalled Windows 2000 again (since it will not let
you change the drive letter of the boot drive, yay).  Now the new drive
was C and the old drive was D, perfect.  I then copied over all of my
data.  Thank god none of that was lost.  Unfortunately, I had lost the
entire weekend due to computer troubles.


As for the video problems, I would have known exactly what was wrong had
I tried to run XWin.exe at any point during my attempts to fix the jerky
DVDs and video recording.  The first time I ran XWin.exe after setting
up the new hard drive, I noticed that the X background took about 4
seconds to draw, and directory listings were visibly crawling.  This new
card was 10 times slower than my old card when using the DirectDraw
engines; the GDI engine, on the other hand, ran very quickly.  So, I
uninstalled my graphics card drivers (keeping the Hardware Manager
applet open, otherwise this does not work), then reran the setup.exe for
the updated ATI drivers that I had downloaded.  I then rebooted the
machine and the DirectDraw engines were as blazingly fast as expected.
 The problems with the DVD playback and video recording were also fixed.
 I had originally installed the downloaded drivers, thinking that they
would not be overwritten with an older version when I installed the ATI
software from the enclosed CD-ROM, but the drivers were, in fact,
overwritten with an older version.  That older version has terrible
performance.  The newer version is amazing.


In sum total, I now have a machine that I can actually stand to use for
programming again.  You could probably chart my fall-off in involvement
with Cygwin/XFree86 and notice that it has only been happening since I
damanaged my monitor.  Now that I have a normal monitor, I expect to get
a little patching done now and then.

Thanks once again to all of those who have contributed (source code,
donations, anything) to the Cygwin/XFree86 project!

Harold