https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1863&p=27942#p27942
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melamkish
Thursday, 05 January 2006, 12:10 AM

Re: My turn to Rant
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Cooler heads and calm minds prevail.  After a good night's sleep and a fresh pot of coffee, a more detailed and analytical approach.   :) 

Mind you now, I'm not prone to fits of real anger.  I've been accused of being more Vulcan like than Mr. Spock. But on occasion, even I get hot under the collar and have to vent some steam.  A little virtual anger helped to clear the mind. 

At about the time a couple of programs started acting up, I had done several things.  Windows Update, loaded new graphics drivers, loaded some miscellaneous utilities (by the way, multi-pipe download managers are awesome), and I loaded Poser.  

After this last failed re-load of windows, it occured to me that I have had several failed windows loads before.  Now I've lost real count, but yesterday I let the windows installation cd partition and format the hard drive.  That was the main problem.  And again, this has happened before.  Although I don't know if I can prove it, even if windows formats the drive it appears as if the installer reads some of the settings from the registry and holds them in memory.  I noticed some issues after installation that should have clued me to dirty installation.  To ensure a clean installation, I formatted the drive with the hard drive installation cd, then let windows installer format and then install windows.  Now I have a working, clean installation and my CAD program is working.

Before I go on, a couple of technical corrections.  XP prior to the installation of Service Pack 1 will only recognize drives as large as 137GB.  I thought the Microsoft Knowledge base on checkdisk issues mentioned SP2.  I could be wrong here, and will research later.  But the Catch 22 mentioned earlier can get you.

During the above process, I broke updating windows into little chunks and tested and did backups.  All the updates are installed and no problems.  Now to complete loading and testing.

Whew.  That's about it.  Thinking back, now, in my rush to get up after the checkdisk crash, I did not ensure a real clean installation.    Self-inflicted injury is the worst kind. :oops: 

Thanks for listening.  Onward and upward! May the Force be with you!  The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and oh, yes, Live long and Prosper!

Pangor, when things on your end calm down and return to normal, PM me with your hardware needs.  I have an old P233 sitting in the basement collecting dust.  Recently cleaned it up and tested.  Still works with Dos 6.2 loaded.  Would be willing to let it or parts of it go for the cost of shipping (after reciept and inspection, of course)

Tormie, I relate.  All my hard drives are new this year.  I recently bought an UPS because I've had a power outage corrupt everything.  In fact, this morning power almost went out, but recovered before the computer lost it.  Gotta get the UPS back on line.