The Sony PS3 thread (apparently *still* obnoxious!)

Roobarb · Post by **Roobarb** » Fri Nov 03, 2006 3:09 pm 0

Mir Nyet wrote:Tablet PCs are a little odd to start with, and if it had been designed to work with XP, then 98 with XP only devices would tank the tablet surely?

It might not work as expected (device not found, fallback VGA driver used etc), but Windows itself doesn't go round changing the firmware or BIOS in some non-recoverable way.

I can think of a few situations were you could get problems though:
. Ancient disks where the CHS geometry info was stored in NVRAM on motherboard, and corrupted by a virus. You'd have to go way back (late 80's / early 90's) to find a machine like that though, and it's still recoverable if you can remember the numbers to configure the BIOS with.
. Running a monitor at a higher frequency than it's designed for. Not sure how much of an issue that is with modern stuff, especially LCD's.
. If the hardware doesn't have an override for ACPI thermal zone management, then if the ACPI control software crashes or doesn't work with the device properly, things can get messy.
I'm sure there are others.

[Feeblez] · Post by **[Feeblez]** » Fri Nov 03, 2006 3:10 pm 0

HGFB wrote:
Bubba wrote:And I'd be saying exactly the same thing if someone posted an "OMFG t3h linuxes killed my computorz" post.
I seem to remember one version of the Mandrake installer that had a tendancy to brick certain cd drives

I installed Mandrake once and it bricked my hard drive, apparently all because Linux didn't support my processor. (AMD K6-II)

I had to download a Maxtor utility and do a low level format, (FDISK wasn't having any of it), thankfully that got it working again.

Roobarb · Post by **Roobarb** » Fri Nov 03, 2006 5:13 pm 0

HGFB wrote:I seem to remember one version of the Mandrake installer that had a tendancy to brick certain cd drives

I believe it was specifically certain firmware revs of LG drives, which interpreted a valid CD-RW command as an instruction to flash the drive. Obviously if you have a piece of hardware/firmware which doesn't conform to the standards then you can't blame the OS if it goes tits up when sent perfectly valid commands/data. AFAIK the particular piece of packet writing software was in the Linux mainline, not just specific to Mandrake although they did root cause and fix it.

[Feeblez] wrote:I installed Mandrake once and it bricked my hard drive, apparently all because Linux didn't support my processor. (AMD K6-II)
I had to download a Maxtor utility and do a low level format, (FDISK wasn't having any of it), thankfully that got it working again.

Was that their PowerMax software by any chance? I suspect the Master Boot Record got corrupted to the point fdisk couldn't deal with it, and PowerMax zeroed out the disk block, thus allowing FDISK to start with an empty slate. Low level Format is a bit of misnomer these days, as HDDs don't expose raw sectors anymore, but 'Logical Blocks'. You can zero all the logical blocks presented by the disk (kind of a 'mid-level format'), but the disk controller itself maps those to real physical sectors based on its own internal geometry settings, and tracks and remaps dodgy sectors (it maintains a pool of spare sectors).

That was probably very boring. Oh well. Move along.

[Feeblez] · Post by **[Feeblez]** » Fri Nov 03, 2006 5:43 pm 0

Roobarb wrote:Was that their PowerMax software by any chance? I suspect the Master Boot Record got corrupted to the point fdisk couldn't deal with it, and PowerMax zeroed out the disk block, thus allowing FDISK to start with an empty slate. Low level Format is a bit of misnomer these days, as HDDs don't expose raw sectors anymore, but 'Logical Blocks'. You can zero all the logical blocks presented by the disk (kind of a 'mid-level format'), but the disk controller itself maps those to real physical sectors based on its own internal geometry settings, and tracks and remaps dodgy sectors (it maintains a pool of spare sectors).

That was probably very boring. Oh well. Move along.

It was quite a few years back, but yes, that sounds very familiar, i did indeed zero all the logical blocks! I'm not very tech savy so please excuse my ignorance. I just know that my Linux box was not to be, not with that model of CPU at least.

Yeah it was boring, moving along.

Stone · Post by **Stone** » Fri Nov 03, 2006 6:48 pm 0

Roobarb wrote:
HGFB wrote:I seem to remember one version of the Mandrake installer that had a tendancy to brick certain cd drives
I believe it was specifically certain firmware revs of LG drives, which interpreted a valid CD-RW command as an instruction to flash the drive. Obviously if you have a piece of hardware/firmware which doesn't conform to the standards then you can't blame the OS if it goes tits up when sent perfectly valid commands/data. AFAIK the particular piece of packet writing software was in the Linux mainline, not just specific to Mandrake although they did root cause and fix it.

I seem to remember it was an unused command (the installer was only using it because the way the drive reacted was one way of deciding whether the drive supported CD-RW or not). Unfortunately anything labelled 'reserved' is usually bad to fuck about with

Stone

Bubba · Post by **Bubba** » Fri Nov 03, 2006 9:19 pm 0

Yeah, sounds like it fucked with the firmware. Which the Windows 98 installation categorically does not do. 98 Also supports ACPI (ok, may not be the latest revision), so you can rule out that killing them. What else does an OS installation do bar scribble some stuff on the hard drive (all of which easily erasable, even in a worst case scenario with tools like Powermax) and initialise devices. If the device initialisation is fucked up then bad things will happen, but I have no reason to believe this would happen with 98 simply because it's not that clever.

Unless you can post some more details about this, and give me an idea why you think the 98 installer has caused cat zap electric death to your tablets OBSAK I'm afraid I'm labelling this as one of your "Micro$oft am t3h suck because i says so" rants and preparing some more images from CloudMX's photobucket. Possibly something with kittens in it this time...

Cheers

Bubba

Kronos · Post by **Kronos** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 1:02 am 0

Talking with the tech support guy at Fujitsu it's possible it had burnt out the CPU (AMD 5x86) in some sort of logical loop. It was on the installation process, first run before the reboot, IIRC they both died around the same place whilst thinking about the recovery disk (which of course these tablets didn't have a floppy drive) and it was stuck at a certain percentage with no hard disk activity for a while but just assumed they were slowwwwwww

Anyway both died within seconds of each other (was doing a parallel instal on identical machines...it's just quicker) and never ever worked again, totally fried not even the green light to indicate the charger is connected comes on either of them now, kaput.

Pre-XP Windows does suck though

and can I have ginger tabby kittens thanks

Bubba · Post by **Bubba** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 1:51 am 0

Logical loop? 5x86?

more like

Cheers

Bubba

Anders · Post by **Anders** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 6:47 am 0

Remember when this thread was about the PS3? Those were the days, I'm telling you!

mightyzim · Post by **mightyzim** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:15 pm 0

So what do we think about having to install games (though this may be optional) before playing them?
This is about the PS3 and not windows 98 by the way

teamonkey · Post by **teamonkey** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:26 pm 0

mightyzim wrote:So what do we think about having to install games (though this may be optional) before playing them?
This is about the PS3 and not windows 98 by the way

Why do you actively need to install games? I mean, no-one notices when games install themselves on the 360.

chub · Post by **chub** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:32 pm 0

mightyzim wrote:So what do we think about having to install games (though this may be optional) before playing them?
This is about the PS3 and not windows 98 by the way

I didn't know about that. Why would a PS3 game need to install something? I thought it would be just like other machines, and just put a user profile or game save file on the hard disk.

Kronos · Post by **Kronos** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:33 pm 0

Not heard that to be honest. Depends why you would have to, maybe it's to do with online play seeing as it's a "per game" basis on the PS3?

GRAW installed an update on my 360 the day I got it IIRC.

Anyway I tried to steer it back on track about Virtua Tennis 3(AKA Zombies invade the courts!) graphics but no-one noticed

mightyzim · Post by **mightyzim** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:34 pm 0

Install as in you have to wait 10 mins while files are copied to the PS3's hd.

http://hgamer.blogspot.com/2006/11/play ... games.html

Alarm · Post by **Alarm** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:39 pm 0

mightyzim wrote:Install as in you have to wait 10 mins while files are copied to the PS3's hd.

http://hgamer.blogspot.com/2006/11/play ... games.html

That article doesn't make pleasant reading, if what they say is true.

YakYak

The Sony PS3 thread (apparently still obnoxious!)