Dead Hard Drive and My Process

So, I have been pretty sure for a while that the main Hard Drive in my desktop was going out.  It’s probably the oldest drive I own and occasionally it got feisty during reboots.  For a variety of reasons, I kept putting off replacing it.

… and putting it off…. and putting it off…

Then I went down to my office one day, the wife and kids were heading out for the weekend, I had grand plans to waste away my weekend on Overwatch and Battlefield 1.  Those plans came to an abrupt halt because I was greeted with a GRUB error.  My first assumption was that, as has happened before, Windows 10 did an update and screwed things up again.  A good while back I encountered  similar problem and after some troubleshooting I found that my Linux partition had been wiped out.  I reinstalled Ubuntu there and everything booted just fine.  Windows 10 had just done and update and after some searching online there were sporadic reports of similar issues.  After some troubleshooting trying to use a Windows disk to do a Master Boot Record fix and then trying to reinstall Ubuntu again, it became apparent that instead, the drive had failed.

This complicates things a bit.  I pulled out my SpinRite disc and threw it in the drive, hoping it would find and correct the error.  It instead threw out an error partway through the scan.  It’s an older disc, I’m honestly not sure if it’s compatible with the newer set up.  Instead I tried a copy of Norton Ghost to clone the drive to a spare 1TB drive I had in the cabinet.  It looked promising as well, though it also listed that it would take nearly 50 hours to finish.

I guess that meant no Battlefield but Overwatch runs fine on the laptop so a weekend of Overwatch and Netflix it would be.

Unfortunately, the clone crapped out as well after about an hour.

The final solution was to simply reinstall Windows 10, on a new drive.  I never use Ubuntu on the desktop so I opted not to bother reinstalling it.  I downloaded the official Windows 10 recover ISO and ran through the install.  During the install I skipped over entering the CD Key, Windows 10 is supposed to activate itself based on account credentials and hardware on the same machine, time to test that concept out.  The install finishes up and Windows 10 loads up just fine.  It’s even activated as promised in all of the Windows 10 feature lists.

The next task involves getting things back up and running order.

In recent years I’ve pushed a lot of my data off onto either my NAS or into Cloud accessible storage.  This makes this whole task much much easier.  I keep very little irrecoverable data on any one machine these days.  There are a few folders that I will need to recover from the old drive, but nothing super important, and I should be able to simply hook the drive up using a USB drive bay and do normal recovery operations to get to my data.

More interesting through, I ended up saving a ton of time and bandwidth with the games I had on the machine.  At one point I had nearly all of my 1000 Steam Games downloaded and installed, all of my GOG galaxy games and all of my Origin games installed.  These games are spread across several drives of varying size in this machine.  Once I reinstalled Steam, I set up Steam to use each of these drives and it simply detected all of the downloaded games, automatically.  The same happened with GOG Galaxy.  I didn’t see a way to make Origin to reattach to it’s old data so I just dumped that folder and redownloaded things as needed.

Honestly, ultimately this whole debacle has been a bit of a godsend.  I now have a fresh clean Windows 10 install, not one from my Windows 7 upgraded to Windows 10.  I also have a slightly nicer and faster drive as the main drive, which helps performance a bit.  It also gave me an excuse to purge out a lot of cruft I wasn’t really using.  I’ve shifted a lot of my computer use to my laptop, the desktop is primarily used for gaming, so it doesn’t really need anything else installed that doesn’t serve that purpose.

The Build Process

I got a stack of boxes last Thursday, somewhat previously discussed.

I already owned the case.  It’s this one here.  It’s basic, holds a shitload of hard drives, and has several huge quiet 120mm fans.  I also already had a 1TB SATA drive to use.

It’s been a while since I have built a PC, but, in general, it’s pretty simple.  The hard part is picking out the components really, which obviously, I’ve already done.  He was not around for the build but my son asked if I thought I would be done putting my computer together within a few months.  He seemed surprised when I told him it would take maybe an hour, once I had all of the parts.

The only real key is making sure the heat sink on the processor makes good contact and works, since otherwise, you’re liable to burn up an expensive component.

The place to start is the Motherboard.  Here it is, removed from the box and placed on its static bag.

This part is essentially the central nervous system of the computer.  It connects all of the other parts together and lets them communicate.  It does a few other things but at it’s core, that’s what it does.  The Motherboard can’t do math for crap though, which is why the next step is to add the Processor, which more or less only does math… very very quickly. 

It’s small, maybe an inch and a half square.  This one runs at I believe 3.3 Ghz, with 4 cores, which essentially means it does 3.3 Billion calculations per second and can do four calculations at a time.  This chip costs more than any other individual component in this computer.  Because it works hard and runs everything, it also gets hot quickly.  Which is why the next step is to add the heat sink. 

Ok, so a little story on this humongous heatsink and fan.  The last time i bought a processor, it did not include a heatsink of it’s own.  Heatsinks, personally, a pretty generic and unless you’re overclocking the CPU, you really don’t need much.  So I threw the “Number one selling CPU Heatsink on Amazon that was only like $20 anyway” on my order.  The pictures on Amazon make it look like a standard chunk of metal that sits on the CPU with the fan on top.

Turns out the chip came with a heatsink and fan.  It also turns out that the one I bought was like four times larger than expected.  I decided that since it was cheap, I may aw well use it rather than return it.

Hence, gigantic heat sink.  Fortunately, the case I’m using is pretty large.

The last step before bolting the Motherboard assembly into the case is to stick the RAM in.  It’s nothing particularly exciting other than I had to consult the manual to figure out the optimal slot placement.

After the board is in the case, the power supply can be strapped in as well.  The manual suggested putting the PS in first but my experience has been that often the PS obstructs access to the Mother Board.  It didn’t in this case (pun intended) but I waited anyway.  I also stuck the hard drive into the drive bay and reinserted it.

While the view is still relatively clear, I also wired in all of the front panel controls and lights.  Just a side note, I ended up putting all of these in reverse, which meant opening the case later and flipping them all over.  No biggie.

Finally, the Graphics card is inserted.

The desire to upgrade the GPU was a heavy driver in my decision to build a PC to begin with.  This one can be expanded to a second card using some ATI technology that I forget the name of if I want to add a second one.  It’s huge and pretty impressive to look at.

Finally, everything is assembled and it’s time to power things up.

I go through and describe the build Process for a home desktop PC.

Aside from the flipped button leads, I also had a bit of a worry when turning it on with the cooling.  The PS fan doesn’t power up unless it’s needed, so it didn’t immediately spring to life as expected.   This wasn’t helped by rear fan, which it turns out is dead.  I’ve since bought a replacement for it though I have not installed it yet.

I also ran into a slight snag when I went to install the OS.  I don’t own any SATA CD/DVD/BluRay/Disc drives.  Fortunately, I have a USB DVD drive for my netbook, which functioned just fine for this use.

I also had to wait a day for my Monitor to come in and later realized I don’t own a second USB Keyboard or Mouse (no PS/2 Ports).

It’s been running just fine for several days now.

I can run all of my games on super uber graphics mode with no stutter or slow downs.  It boots up very quickly, despite the non SSD hard drive.  Basically, it’s everything it’s supposed to be.

Building a New PC

I am extremely familiar with the insides and mechanics behind build a PC from scratch.  I’ve put together several machines for both personal use and at (my old) work.  I also have done numerous upgrades to hard drives, RAM, GPUs, etc over the years.  I’ve wired up cases for better cooling and upgraded a PC so much that I rebuilt the original PC with all of it’s original parts.

I’ve never ever bought all the parts at once to put them together as a cohesive whole at the same time.

In the recent move, I’ve gained an office space.  Part of my desire for this office space is that it’s not going to be where the kids hang out to play on the computer.  Unfortunately, I can’t just stick them with one of my extra older PCs, it’ll never work out.  So I’m using the opportunity to build myself a new gaming rig.  Computer components have gotten so ridiculously confusing these days.  The last time I seriously build a PC it was simple.  If the processor speed was higher, it was better.  A 2 GHZ PC was pretty much always going to be better than a 1.8ghz PC.  Unless it’s a Celeron, then it just sucked no matter what.

Now it’s all Cores and i7s, and i3s and Phenom IIs and crazy numbers that are mostly just ePeen related.  Fortunately I am aware than GPU means more to a PC than CPU.  That’s why I started with GPU.  My old machine actually performs much better than I would ever expect considering it’s only Dual core and it’s a stock Dell machine with a new GPU and some RAM.  The key was, I picked out a good GPU when I bought it.

So I did some research on benchmarks and performance and came up with a Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6850.  It’s not a top of the line card but it ranks very highly and costs about half as much as the cards ranking similarly.  I’m still being budget conscious with my choices and trying to get the best value I can.

I then did move on to processor.  As I said, modern processors confuse me, so I started off looking into the AMD chip recommended by Amazon to go with the GPU.  It was a place to start more than anything.  I’ve had a lot of AMD CPUs and always liked them.  They used to be the top dog but I was pretty sure Intel had come back to the lead.

Some Google searching suggested that it’s not real great unless it’s overclocked and I’m not really interested in trying to overclock anything.  It’s not that I don’t think I could do it, it’s more than I don’t want to have to buy another $150 processor when I fuck it up.  One thread I found on this chip had several recommendations for the Intel i5 2500 3.3Ghz.  It’s a Quad Core chip.   I did a bit more research and decided to go for this chip.  Mostly my research was into i5 vs i7, but this i5 is supposed to be pretty decent.  Besides, CPU is less important and I’m going to better value with a good punch.

On a side note, I also am hazy on the details but I also know that more cores doesn’t always mean better.  4 cores doesn’t make this a 12 Ghz processor, not every application uses multiple cores.  However I do a fair amount of Photo editing with Photoshop and I do a fair amount of editing with Adobe Premier, BOTH programs I know benefit from using multiple cores.

At this point I threw on a compatible fan nothing fancy, it was cheap and ranked 1st in fans on Amazon so I bought it.  I also threw on a 500W power supply to run it all.  I have a 500W power supply but it’s got some bad bearings in the fans and runs loud.  I could probably fix it but electricity scares me and I am pretty sure power supplies can be dangerous even when un plugged.

all that was left was to tie it together with a motherboard.  I picked up one from the list of recommended ones, it’s listed as Gigabyte Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2133 LGA 1155 Motherboard GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 and is very Blue.

So, because it coordinates, I picked up 8 GB of Blue RAM with flashy cooling fins to go in it.

I didn’t need to get a case, I have a very large and nice case I bought last time I built a machine.  it is absolutely boring as hell in it’s designs but that was what I wanted, something that “wasn’t curvy and swoopy and neon and looked like a Riced up Honda PC”.

I’m not showing this thing off for looks.

I also already have some hard drives.  I have a 1 TB that I’ll probably stick in it out of my current machine.  It keeps disappearing from the OS, but I am 90% sure it’s because that stock Dell Power supply sucks and can’t handle running 3 hard drives and a GPU.

I also don’t need a Monitor.  I ordered a decently large LCD a week ago when I thought I was going to be running a different older machine in the office.

Anyway, I’m pretty stoked.  I also went in for the Amazon Prime trial so everything should be here by Thursday.

Procrastination Isn’t Always Bad

I almost always have a couple of dozen projects I’m working on.  These are not projects for work or even household projects that my wife wants me to take care of.  These are personal projects of varying importance though generally of little overall *real* importance.  For example, at the moment I am working on:

– Building a solid automated online streaming radio service.

– Playing through several video games.

– Burning old family VHS tapes to DVDs

– Building a small corner shelf for putting my games and DVDs on in the bedroom to reduce the clutter in the closet.

– Repairing several laptops i have that don’t work.

Etc…

Anyway, Several of these projects I’m “working on” are continual, like playing through various games.  Others I have not even started on, though I still would say I’m “working on them”.  Some I may never start.  The point is that I tend to think about a large string of projects in the back of my mind almost constantly.

Often when i have “free time” I do something completely different when I should be doing “a project”.  I have a tendency to procrastinate on these things.  Often this procrastination though is good because inevitably, I get an epiphany on some project that makes it extremely simple and quick and it’s the best possible solution.

The latest example, which inspired this rambling blog post involves my home network.  It’s not huge but it is larger than most people’s home networks and it “evolves” much more than most people’s home networks.  Currently, the phone line feeds the cable box thing (we’ll call this the Residential Gateway or RG for lack of  better term though I’m not sure it’s actually accurate).  It comes out of the RG and feeds a router.  This router was put in by the cable guy when he came out to replace the RG when it broke.  The thing is, he left the old router in place (also provided by the phone company).  This initially created some issues since it gave me two IP address sets which is annoying when you’re doing a lot of NAT translations for things like streaming radio and VNC access to half a dozen machines as well as hosting FTP, HTTP, etc.  I also own a switch and a hub, though I don’t use the Hub because "hubs suck”. 

I lived with forwarding all ports to the internal router for a while but inevitably I swapped the Hub for the switched, changed the IPs of all my machines and rebuilt the NAT table.  it was a one time pain but it makes things simpler.

I put the old router aside until I discovered the the new router does not support the older less secure Wireless protocols that my Nintendo DS requires.  So the old router went back in almost exclusively for use of the NDS, whoes IP address I don’t care about.  It also serves as an access point for guests or whatever to keep them off of the main network.

The issue I had recently however involves a remote location in the house in my wife’s office.  She has a PC out there for “office use” and I put a second PC out there recently with a KVM for my “experimenting etc” use.  Currently it hosts Lameazoid Radio, an OpenSIM server, a session of Outlook that is attached to archives of all of my old email PST files and I use it for downloading Torrents.  The main point is, it creates a lot of network traffic.  The problem is, there’s only one physical cable running to the office and running a second one would be a pain.  the obvious answer is, put in a switch.  I could use the hub but I fear the high traffic of the one machine would cause lots of issues for the office computer and visa versa.

I’d pretty much resolved myself that I can afford a 30 dollar switch to throw out there.  The problem is that i just got off of a huge backup with my “personal budget” from buying several expensive items “in advance” and then paying back the budget.  I’m tired of being broke for the past 2 months on my personal budget.  Also, Black Friday is coming up and I intend to have a chunk of change to spend on good deals.

So I can drop money and be short on BF, or i can wait a few weeks and listen to my wife occasionally complain that the office PC doesn’t have internet access.  So I decided to “sit on” or procrastinate this project.

Then I had the epiphany.  I can move the main Router over to where the switch is now and swap them out.  The only thing plugged into the main router besides the long network cable running across the room tot he switch is an old laptop I was trying to project but i can’t keep running anyway.  It can be dropped.  I was going to plug a media center PC into it for Hulu but Netflix on the Wii eliminates the need for that and I already have a long cable running back to the TV area from before the newer Router was there anyway I can use.

The point is, that I don’t NEED it to be where it is.  Then I get my switch back.

The real point is, because I didn’t rush into putting in the hub or rush out to buy a switch, i came up with the best solution AND it doesn’t cost me anything. I do this a lot.  I did it at my old job all the time.   I’d sit on a project until I’d realize I can combine two obsolete items into something useful or whatever.  The point is, sometimes it’s good to procrastinate.

Automatic Updating of New Podcasts with Radio DJ

That has to be one of the lamest topics I’ve ever made for a blog post but it’s at least descriptive.

This is a short guide for users of the Free RadioDJ software who want to automate the process of adding new podcasts to the rotation.  This is mildly complicated but not overly so and it does require the use of outside programs to make it work.  For this example, I’ll be using the NoAgenda podcast.

The first thing you’ll need is a pod catching program.  I use gPodder but if you have a preferred alternative you can use whatever you like.  The key here is that the program needs to download the files into one regular location that you can reference with some batch files.

For those who are less familiar with the old school DOS environment and batch files, basically, a batch file, or .bat is a file which contains command line commands which will be executed in order.  It’s similar to making scripts in Linux only for Windows/DOS.  For simplicity, I recommend making a single .bat file for each show you want to run and naming them something like renameSHOW.bat.  I keep mine in the c: Root directory but you can put them in a folder somewhere if you’d like.  It’s probably better to try to keep all files in folders without spaces since DOS and the command line can get funny when spaces are involved.  This goes for your downloaded Podcasts as well.

To change the default download directory in gPodder, right click a Podcast and change the name description to one without spaces.  For example, if the default picked up is “No Agenda”, change it to “NoAgenda”.  For other programs you’ll have to figure this out on your own.

Next, create a batch file.  If you have file extensions turned on you can right click in the c: directory and do a “Create new –> Text File” then name it, for example “renamenoagenda.bat”  Alternately, simply open up Notepad, then save as “renamenoagenda.bat” in the appropriate directory.

Edit the file with Notepad or any preferred basic ASCII editor.  Add the lines shown below.

if exist d:PodcastsNoAgendanoagenda*.mp3 del d:PodcastsNoAgendanaradio.mp3

rename d:PodcastsNoAgendanoagenda*.mp3 naradio.mp3

You’ll want to replace the paths in this manner. “d:PodcastsNoagenda is the directory where the Podcasts are stored.  This will be dependant on your program and settings.  I have a second drive in my Pc where I store all the music RadioDJ uses.

“noagenda*.mp3” is the generic name of what’s downloaded by gPodder.  Each episode is something like “Noagenda-Episode-Date-Whatever.mp3.  They ALL start with “noagenda” and all end with “.mp3”.  using this will pick any episodes in the directory.

The file “naradio.mp3” is the file used by RadioDJ.  It is a generic file that RadioDj has in it’s list and it is of the type “Variable Length Audio”.  This will make RadioDJ get the length when it goes to play this file.  i use this format “radioXXXX".mp3” for simplicity.  For example, I’m also rotating FLOSS Weekly, which is called “radiofw.mp3”.  The key here is that the file CANNOT have the same starting name as the downloaded podcasts.  If I were to call it “noagendageneric.mp3” for example, then it would be picked up by the “noagenda*.mp3” call which would screw everything up.

Now, the essense of what this file is doing. 

if exist d:PodcastsNoAgendanoagenda*.mp3 del d:PodcastsNoAgendanaradio.mp3

 

This line says “if there is a file named noagenda*.mp3*, then delete the generic file.  I had trouble originally because I simply had the .bat delete the generic file.  This presents and issue if a Podcast has not been updated and there is not a new file to replace it.

rename d:PodcastsNoAgendanoagenda*.mp3 naradio.mp3

This line says “Rename noagenda*.mp3 to the generic file.”  This will create the new generic file that Radio DJ will use.  Also of note, this will “consume” the new episode.  This whole process requires that there is only one new episode.  if you’re clever this script COULD be adopted to create a series of rotating episodes.  I’m not going to get into that detail here however.  Essentially it would be a series of scripts that run daily.

Which brings up the next step.  You’ve created a batch file, now you need to schedule it to run using Windows task scheduler.  Simply set it up to run as needed.  For example, i run new episodes at 7PM, so i run the file at 6:30 PM on the day it’s needed.  The changes are essentially instantaneous so i could run them as 6:59 if I wanted.  I also have a short new segment which runs hourly.  This one runs at 4AM.

The thing that will sort of break this is if the downloaded new episodes do not use a regular file name.  Also if your Podcast feed isn’t updated in time.  The result hwoever will be that the generic file won’t change and an old episode will run in it’s place, so at least something should run.