Quasar
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Status Replies posted by Quasar
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Well, has been for the last month, but it's gotten so bad I mostly use my laptop's clicker and playing doom becomes quite painful, pressing down so hard on the back of the click. It's at least a year old, razer diamondback, not sure on warranty, probably expired. I opened the case once already to try cleaning it anyway, not sure if that helped at all.
Anyway I'm interested in what the tech gurus think of my options, them being try to fix the mouse myself and quite likely fing something up, get some techy to fix it, or buy a new mouse and if so which one ~~has to be somewhat cheap while giving the same range of sensitivity of the diamondback, I can't stand how slow the mice at my college's library were set.
So awaiting replies ... -
Go ahead. We both know you want to.
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If you were on IRC then you already know about this, but this last weekend my XP box, known formerly as "The Doom Palace" (due to my PII having been named "DoomShack") abruptly died.
I seemed to have some sort of spyware infection, as clicking on a certain link to Wikipedia caused random redirects in Firefox to sites attempting to install more spyware. So, I ran Spybot, which found nothing, then I installed Malwarebytes, which found some stuff masquerading as .png's in Firefox's cache. I had it clean that stuff up, and then I installed some pending Windows updates.
The final update, KB974417, failed to fully install. After waiting a good 20 minutes for it to do anything, I finally killed the installer process and restarted. Much to my horror, the computer began rebooting constantly, never making it past the Windows XP startup screen. After using BartPE with the registry editor plugin and modifying the value of the "reboot on error" setting, I saw this:
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
hobbs and I went through every possible candidate solution and none of them did a damn thing. I got my data backed up onto a new external hard drive before attempting a fixmbr, which was ineffectual anyway.
The box is currently even more dead, since after I attempted to delete the busted restore partition and rebuild the boot configuration, it started complaining of an invalid partition table - note that the partition table is intact, however. When booted under BartPE or RIP Linux, all my files are still on there.
So in short, you can't be too careful these days. Even with everything I know about computers, I don't have a clue what actually happened here. Did the malware do something deliberately destructive? Did Malwarebytes corrupt something? Did the failed update kill my XP install? Or was this the long-expected and planned-ahead-for partial failure of my hard drive at an inopportune moment? I'll probably never know.
The box is scheduled for reconstruction with a new 160 GB HD which is being shipped from from newegg as I type this. On the plus side, it finally got me around to getting my new Win7 box going ^_^-
Maes said:
You can combine an installation and a repair using Windows XP's "repair installation" option (not the recovery console). Let the CD boot all the way to where you choose partitions to install, and if your present installation is visible, choose it and press "R" instead of just Enter. This will start a procedure similar to a normal installation, only that user settings, installed programs, accounts etc. will be preserved.
The only prerequisites are that the partition table is readable during installation, and that the previous OS is recognizable, else the "Repair" option won't appear. If it's not visible right away, try booting with Ultimate Boot CD for Windows or Hiren's tools, and perform a chkdsk with fixes, then try again.
Also, in the case of XP-XP "repair installs", they must be the same language (us-en won't repair-install over uk-en, nor will multilingual XP packs). The installation CD can be of a higher or lesser service pack, and can be either home or pro version: in either case, it will "automagically" transform the existing installation, so this is also a good trick to skip several intermediate service packs (you can even upgrade a home sp0 version to pro sp3 in one step, which is normally impossible).Repair install is not available for OEM XP as far as I can tell. You are expected to use the OEM restore functionality instead. I already risked downloading an XP image just to find this out -- it offers to install fresh, or to run the recovery partition. No option to repair, and even if it did, the resulting XP retail install would invalidate my OEM key.
Everything else you're suggesting I've already tried. I already chkdsk /r'd, I ran fixboot and fixmbr more than once. Everything has been tried. The only possible solution at this point is to do a fresh recovery to a new hard drive and hope this never happens again.
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If you were on IRC then you already know about this, but this last weekend my XP box, known formerly as "The Doom Palace" (due to my PII having been named "DoomShack") abruptly died.
I seemed to have some sort of spyware infection, as clicking on a certain link to Wikipedia caused random redirects in Firefox to sites attempting to install more spyware. So, I ran Spybot, which found nothing, then I installed Malwarebytes, which found some stuff masquerading as .png's in Firefox's cache. I had it clean that stuff up, and then I installed some pending Windows updates.
The final update, KB974417, failed to fully install. After waiting a good 20 minutes for it to do anything, I finally killed the installer process and restarted. Much to my horror, the computer began rebooting constantly, never making it past the Windows XP startup screen. After using BartPE with the registry editor plugin and modifying the value of the "reboot on error" setting, I saw this:
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
hobbs and I went through every possible candidate solution and none of them did a damn thing. I got my data backed up onto a new external hard drive before attempting a fixmbr, which was ineffectual anyway.
The box is currently even more dead, since after I attempted to delete the busted restore partition and rebuild the boot configuration, it started complaining of an invalid partition table - note that the partition table is intact, however. When booted under BartPE or RIP Linux, all my files are still on there.
So in short, you can't be too careful these days. Even with everything I know about computers, I don't have a clue what actually happened here. Did the malware do something deliberately destructive? Did Malwarebytes corrupt something? Did the failed update kill my XP install? Or was this the long-expected and planned-ahead-for partial failure of my hard drive at an inopportune moment? I'll probably never know.
The box is scheduled for reconstruction with a new 160 GB HD which is being shipped from from newegg as I type this. On the plus side, it finally got me around to getting my new Win7 box going ^_^-
InsanityBringer said:
Something kinda similar happened to our old laptop, but it wasn't too hard to fix. All it needed was a reinstall and the issue never cropped up. My current XP machine has been going fine though. And at this rate it will continue to go fine for quite a while now until my dad comes in and forces me to upgrade to windows 7 or else (or until I have an actual need for 7)
These issues like to come from nowhere from what it seems. It also happened to a school PC a few years ago.A complete reinstall was what I was hoping to avoid. I wanted to make sure I exhausted all possibilities for an in-place repair first. And since I can't trust the hard drive that's in it now, I figured I should just wait and run the restore to the new disk when it gets here.
Windows 7 is great. No problems with it here so far :)
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If you were on IRC then you already know about this, but this last weekend my XP box, known formerly as "The Doom Palace" (due to my PII having been named "DoomShack") abruptly died.
I seemed to have some sort of spyware infection, as clicking on a certain link to Wikipedia caused random redirects in Firefox to sites attempting to install more spyware. So, I ran Spybot, which found nothing, then I installed Malwarebytes, which found some stuff masquerading as .png's in Firefox's cache. I had it clean that stuff up, and then I installed some pending Windows updates.
The final update, KB974417, failed to fully install. After waiting a good 20 minutes for it to do anything, I finally killed the installer process and restarted. Much to my horror, the computer began rebooting constantly, never making it past the Windows XP startup screen. After using BartPE with the registry editor plugin and modifying the value of the "reboot on error" setting, I saw this:
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
hobbs and I went through every possible candidate solution and none of them did a damn thing. I got my data backed up onto a new external hard drive before attempting a fixmbr, which was ineffectual anyway.
The box is currently even more dead, since after I attempted to delete the busted restore partition and rebuild the boot configuration, it started complaining of an invalid partition table - note that the partition table is intact, however. When booted under BartPE or RIP Linux, all my files are still on there.
So in short, you can't be too careful these days. Even with everything I know about computers, I don't have a clue what actually happened here. Did the malware do something deliberately destructive? Did Malwarebytes corrupt something? Did the failed update kill my XP install? Or was this the long-expected and planned-ahead-for partial failure of my hard drive at an inopportune moment? I'll probably never know.
The box is scheduled for reconstruction with a new 160 GB HD which is being shipped from from newegg as I type this. On the plus side, it finally got me around to getting my new Win7 box going ^_^-
That's what I'm left to assume, since I already did chkdsk, and fixboot and fixmbr say they are succeeding but won't fix the drive (all that fixmbr did was set my recovery partition to be the primary partition, which was incorrect).
It has 44 KB of bad sectors. The last time it acted up was after a defrag, when it evidently moved my Firefox profile into a bad sector (I forgot to chkdsk first; never ever defrag without doing chkdsk first -_-).
Since that episode, I had been expecting some kind of failure to develop. That's why I went ahead and custom-built my next computer, "NewBox," almost a year ago. I've had it sitting on my kitchen table since then just waiting for the release of Windows 7 (Build me an OS worthy of my computer, etc.) The new box is a quad core with 4 GB RAM and a Radeon 4850, so it's a huge move up.
Once the new hard drive gets here and I run my OEM recovery disk on it (which had better well work!), it will be a "backup" machine for doing XP-ish stuff, and stuff I don't want cluttering up my new box.
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Just modify barrels to explode during their first death frame, and then enter any level where a long line of barrels explode by damaging each other. The following recursion will occur to arbitrary depth:
P_RadiusAttack -> P_BlockThingsIterator -> PIT_RadiusAttack -> P_DamageMobj -> P_KillMobj -> P_SetMobjState -> st->action (A_Explode) -> P_RadiusAttack (etc...)
Not only this, but in the vanilla engine, P_RadiusAttack is non-reentrant, so subsequent explosions will cause the earlier ones to malfunction in an unpredictable manner, such as failing to damage nearby objects, damaging nearby objects too much or too little, etc.-
printz said:
Did you use a software to Place all those Things?
I should look up programming definitions to see what reentrant means...That it changes variables to be read somewhere else?
EDIT: the good thing is that in real life big explosions wouldn't happen instantly. A delay of 1 between death and explosion suffices.Actually I walked around spawning them underneath me after jumping up on top of one, and that's why they're mostly in lines. After a certain point of getting fed up with them not crashing due to the explosions dying out, I just started spamming them all over while running in circles down near the lower left corner. At that point the barrels got so thick I couldn't touch the ground any more. I probably spent about an hour laying all those barrels :P
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Just modify barrels to explode during their first death frame, and then enter any level where a long line of barrels explode by damaging each other. The following recursion will occur to arbitrary depth:
P_RadiusAttack -> P_BlockThingsIterator -> PIT_RadiusAttack -> P_DamageMobj -> P_KillMobj -> P_SetMobjState -> st->action (A_Explode) -> P_RadiusAttack (etc...)
Not only this, but in the vanilla engine, P_RadiusAttack is non-reentrant, so subsequent explosions will cause the earlier ones to malfunction in an unpredictable manner, such as failing to damage nearby objects, damaging nearby objects too much or too little, etc. -
Just modify barrels to explode during their first death frame, and then enter any level where a long line of barrels explode by damaging each other. The following recursion will occur to arbitrary depth:
P_RadiusAttack -> P_BlockThingsIterator -> PIT_RadiusAttack -> P_DamageMobj -> P_KillMobj -> P_SetMobjState -> st->action (A_Explode) -> P_RadiusAttack (etc...)
Not only this, but in the vanilla engine, P_RadiusAttack is non-reentrant, so subsequent explosions will cause the earlier ones to malfunction in an unpredictable manner, such as failing to damage nearby objects, damaging nearby objects too much or too little, etc.-
Pics:
http://eternity.mancubus.net/pics/crash/etrn58.png
http://eternity.mancubus.net/pics/crash/etrn59.png
http://eternity.mancubus.net/pics/crash/etrn60.png
http://eternity.mancubus.net/pics/crash/woops.jpg
Turns out you need a LOT of barrels, under Windows with the default Visual C++ stack setting at least. EE has about 12 KB of stack space, and each function call only uses about 12 bytes on the stack.
Plus, the non-reentrant behavior of the explosions causes them to propagate very poorly, meaning you need almost a complete saturation of an area about a quarter the size of E1M8's star room.
In short, I wouldn't worry too much about ever seeing this error under normal circumstances.
Now, under ZDoom, things might be more interesting because of two facts: first, ZDoom's code is reentrant and thus functions properly, exploding all the barrels at once; second, the fact that P_RadiusAttack uses heap memory means that FBlockThingIterator objects will accumulate at a dramatic rate, and cannot be garbage collected due to the recursive nature of execution. Somebody should test it there too :P
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Just modify barrels to explode during their first death frame, and then enter any level where a long line of barrels explode by damaging each other. The following recursion will occur to arbitrary depth:
P_RadiusAttack -> P_BlockThingsIterator -> PIT_RadiusAttack -> P_DamageMobj -> P_KillMobj -> P_SetMobjState -> st->action (A_Explode) -> P_RadiusAttack (etc...)
Not only this, but in the vanilla engine, P_RadiusAttack is non-reentrant, so subsequent explosions will cause the earlier ones to malfunction in an unpredictable manner, such as failing to damage nearby objects, damaging nearby objects too much or too little, etc.-
Well, I tested this concept today in EE using an EDF modification that overrides the barrel's death states. While it does experience the non-reentrant behavior, I have yet to get enough barrels to go off at once to actually stack fault the game :) I have no idea how the size of the stack segment for a Windows app compares to what vanilla DOOM had under DOS, though, so it may have been either easier or even more difficult to cause the fault there.
I'll update when I find out exactly how many barrels have to go off to kill EE :)
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Just modify barrels to explode during their first death frame, and then enter any level where a long line of barrels explode by damaging each other. The following recursion will occur to arbitrary depth:
P_RadiusAttack -> P_BlockThingsIterator -> PIT_RadiusAttack -> P_DamageMobj -> P_KillMobj -> P_SetMobjState -> st->action (A_Explode) -> P_RadiusAttack (etc...)
Not only this, but in the vanilla engine, P_RadiusAttack is non-reentrant, so subsequent explosions will cause the earlier ones to malfunction in an unpredictable manner, such as failing to damage nearby objects, damaging nearby objects too much or too little, etc.-
That's somewhat related. When you have frames of zero length, the loop in P_SetMobjState will continue to run through them until it reaches a state with non-zero tics. That means that during that process, the game essentially quits running.
State recursion was an easy way to lock up your system, and Lee Killough built in a system of detecting it (within certain limitations) in BOOM. Unfortunately it only works in the case that a single instance of a call to P_SetMobjState sees the same state more than once for the same object. In the sort of recursion I was discussing above, the detection is no good.
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Just modify barrels to explode during their first death frame, and then enter any level where a long line of barrels explode by damaging each other. The following recursion will occur to arbitrary depth:
P_RadiusAttack -> P_BlockThingsIterator -> PIT_RadiusAttack -> P_DamageMobj -> P_KillMobj -> P_SetMobjState -> st->action (A_Explode) -> P_RadiusAttack (etc...)
Not only this, but in the vanilla engine, P_RadiusAttack is non-reentrant, so subsequent explosions will cause the earlier ones to malfunction in an unpredictable manner, such as failing to damage nearby objects, damaging nearby objects too much or too little, etc.-
The issue actually comes from P_SetMobjState and the fact that it does not defer the execution of action functions. This leads to many similar problems of recursion into otherwise non-reentrant code, such as the mobj clipping code.
The spechits underflow error triggered by charging Lost Souls in BOOM was a very similar problem, but a recursion through P_Move rather than P_RadiusAttack.
Other games could very easily have similar issues, though.
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I've tried to play Hexen a million times but could never get past Seven Portals before getting stuck and losing interest. But last week I was having problems playing 3d games and loaded up Hexen just to see if it worked. For some reason I could not pull myself away from the game for 3 hours, and a few days later I finished it. Other games I've bought in the past few years usually can barely keep my interest for one hour, and I almost never finish them.
Anyway I'm really excited because today I remembered that it has an expansion pack, so I'm starting that right now. I also downloaded Hexen 2, Hexen 2's mission pack, and Heretic 2, so I can't wait to start those as soon as possible as well.-
My answer to Hexen II is to first download the Hammer of Thyrion source port, and then to modify the HexenC game code to achieve a balance that is more to my liking.
Certainly I've played through the unmodified game a couple of times, but to me it's just an endless slog. Reducing damage taken and increasing damage dealt makes the game more fun IMO, and is very easy to do by modifying a single function ;)
I also made a couple of artifacts last slightly longer. WTF is up with the duration of Icons? They last all of 10 seconds, which is just enough time for you to get your ass in hot water, and is totally useless against the cheap bosses.
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Today, Quasar is 28. Everyone wish him a Happy Birthday because he's too lame to remind us.
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Today, I subbed for the EBD (Emotional Behavior Disorder) social worker. There are a number of high risk and emotionally disturbed children who come to the room throughout the day. Most of the time the students are fine and just need to be removed from the general classroom for a while. Today just happened to be one of the craziest days of work I've ever had. I had the usual student that I have to go to the classroom and remove because they are being unruly and not following directions and disrupting class... but one kid made the day worthwhile.
This student, a 5 year old Kindergartener, is now on half days because of severe emotional and behavioral problems. He comes at noon each day and starts from there... and the day REALLY started from there. His teacher sent some reading and work for him to do in our room, so he and the Paraprofessional that works one on one with him start reading a story.
He starts out drawing transportation vehicles that Fly/Roll/Slide on a piece of paper... but he gets frustrated drawing a helicopter and starts to throw a fit. Now, I should add that this kid is a runner... so the Para blocks the door to prevent him from running. After Throwing a little fit, he starts putting on his jacket and backpacks (he put 2 on at once). He says...
"I'm done with this, I'm going home. Don't try to stop me, I'm outta here."
Obviously the kid can't leave with an adult blocking the door... but it's at this time that one of the Special Education teachers that works with him, comes down to the room. She talks to him for a while but he's still not hving it. He throws his backpack across the room and throws off his jacket. He traipses across the room to the corner... near the Special Ed teacher and myself.
At this point things start going wild. He strips off his sweatshirt to reveal a blue wife beater and tells us he has some "powerful moves" and will kick our butts. He looks at me and says...
"Back off old man!" ...and proceeds to mutter something again about his skills.
Before I can start laughing under my breath, the kid grabs a long metal rod, about 6 feet in length and begins swirling it around like a bo staff and making kung fu sounds. At this point the Special Ed teacher and I move in slowly as to not get ninja'd by a 5 year old Donatello. Unfortunately for him, Mr. Browning is slightly stronger than a 5 year old, and I move in and grab the bar with both hands as he struggles to ply it from me.
After being disarmed, we managed to calm the student down and get him to quietly work on his project again. He arrived at 12:00PM and it was now 12:30PM.
Later in the day, around 2:00PM, I was on my break period talking with the women in the office. They said there was a kid rolling down the hallway. Being the replacement for the social worker, I stepped out to see what I could do. So there was my kung fu student, rolling down the hall with 2 teachers standing by him.
The technology instructor and I pick him up and haul him back to the classroom. He calms down and asks if he can have a snack. Yeah, sure kid.
The end of the day rolls around and he's still here. He decides that he's going to lay down on the floor and not get ready for the bus. The principal comes down and tries to get him up, then says he's just going to call his dad and tell him to get him. Apparently startled by this revelation, the kid lurches from the floor and walks out the door to his bus.
So... how was your day?-
I covered the same kind of class several times, but I was fortunate to never have anything out of the ordinary occur while I was there. I did however cover Ag Ed. for High School, who as a group acted significantly worse. They were so bad one time they sent over the school cop to help bring things under control.
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Those who frequent #zdoom know that I've been working on resurrecting an old computer, one I didn't even know the age of when I started working on it.
It's a Pentium 75 MHz with 16 MB of RAM (it had 8 initially) and a 1 GB hard drive. I've added a Trident SVGA card, a 3Com 10/100 Mbps network card, an ES1868 sound card, two 4x CD-ROMs, and two 1.44 MB floppies. It's running Win98 with a fairly minimal installation and actually runs fairly well (better than I expected at least).
I had a lot of adventures putting it together. IDing the motherboard, connecting all the drives properly, getting a RAM configuration that would work (it requires paired SIMMs), finding spare parts for it, buying an AT -> PS/2 adapter so I could connect a modern keyboard, finding a serial mouse, and more. It was mostly fun and a little frustrating at times. Ask Bloodshedder about the four hours I spent trying to install the 3Com drivers, finding out in the end that some idiot had compressed them with Microsoft's SZDD compression (there was no tool on the disk that would decompress the files, nor any indication on the website or in the docs that they were supposed to be compressed).
I may add a USB card and a wireless adapter to it if I can find ones that will work with such an ancient system. Once I get this stuff and a monitor for it (it's currently borrowing my PII's monitor), I plan on letting my parents use it so they can have a personal machine and not bother me to use mine ;) -
