I started having an issue with my computer maybe back in May, where anytime I powered my machine off I had to reconfigure my Bios settings, as my primary Bios had failed, after several months of this I guess I just got tired of dealing with it, so I sold my android tablet (yes I did! and no I didn’t own more than one…) and bought a new Gigabyte Ga-990FX`-UD3 motherboard, which right now I am not very happy with, but I’ll get to that later, a new MD PhenomII x6 1090T CPU, a new XFX AMD Radeon 6850 Video Card, and 3 new Seagate 1.5TB HDDs. I have to reimburse myself for the hard drives however, as they were not paid for by selling my tablet. Hopefully selling my old Video Card, Motherboard, and CPU will cover their costs.
I’ve had all kinds of interesting episodes while trying to get this new hardware to work over the last, almost, 3 weeks. the good = back on linux, bye bye Microsoft. The bad=bye bye Google cloud print (kind of), possibility of getting Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking to work (outside of a VM), possibility of getting my digital camera to work by just plugging it in the computer (for now). Here are a list of some of the issues I’ve run into, if they have lengthy resolutions, or attempted resolutions, I’ll link to another post (after I write it!) describing my efforts to get things working.
First up: Microsoft Windows 7 x64 Ultimate edition
- The only thing on the motherboard that works immediately after installation are the CPU, Ram, Keyboard, and Mouse.
- NIC, eSATA, on-board RAID, USB 3.0, none of it worked until after installing the drivers from the MB CD.
- The motherboard has 2 or 3 different RAID chipsets, at least one Marvell 88SE9172 and a Realtek (I think), each can be enabled separately as IDE/AHCI/RAID, I’ll check and get back to you on this one.
- One for the internal SATA ports 0-3.
- One for the internal SATA ports 4 and 5.
- Can only be enabled as RAID when ports 0-3 are also enabled as RAID.
- This seems a little bit backwards to me, as the only way to mirror your boot drive is to enable RAID on all ports… or lose ports 2&3 and mirror on 0&1, then not set RAID on 4&5 giving you only a mirror plus 2 drive slots on the MB. Else you are forced to RAID 0/1 on ports 0-3 and to use 4/5 for your boot mirror.
- One for the eSATA port
- When enabled and nothing is connected, it reports 2 available ports; however when the cable is connected I have gotten 3 drives (out of 4) in my external drive caddy to show up.
- I ran into one issue where I had a device not identified in Windows 7, even after installing the drivers from the CD. I checked on the CD again and it actually has an installer to put Driver Agent on your computer to scan for out of date drivers. well I ran it.
- It found the missing driver and also told me about 6 others were either out of date or had the wrong drivers installed. of the ones it wanted me to update, only one was free, the others were available after paying a $29.99 annual fee.
- The first link took me to the Gigabyte home page for the MB but did not list any driver that was not also included on the CD.
- The second link took me to a driver website download page for an Nvidia driver package!
- Well I gave it a shot, and sure enough it recognized the device and installed the driver, from an Nvidia driver package on my AMD chipset MB.
- Then I started getting BSODs on the RAID driver MV91xx.dll.
- After moving all my data around so I could setup a RAID5 5 drive array of 1.5TB drives, I had to undo it all and move data around to use them as normal disks, so I could disable the Marvell RAID in the BIOS (internal SATA ports 0-5) to prevent windows from loading the driver (which was the newest version from their website).
- This did indeed stop the BSOD for that DLL.
- Then the system started shutting itself off randomly after 4-45 minutes from windows bootup.
- I have not yet figured this one out, Gigabyte support wants me to disconnect all USB devices to test… (no mention of how I am to connect my KB or mouse) fyi no issues with the USB devices when my old MB was in the case, and no issue with the USB devices when booted to a linux live CD, nor any issues with random power offs at all, now that I am booting to Ubuntu 11.10 x64.
- If you press a key (such as ctrl+f or del or F4 or F8 or Shift or anything else really) at anytime during bootup that the system is not expecting a keypress, the boot up process hangs and you have to press the reset button or manually power off the computer.
- What this means is if you are trying to get into the RAID BIOS controller setup, or the “change boot device” menu, or to get the GRUB menu to show up when hidden, or to start windows in safe mode, and you do not press the key/key combination one time at the exact time necessary, the system will hang and you cannot get in to that boot submenu
- It often takes me 10-30 boot attempts to get into what ever submenu I need to change the configuration.
- Ubuntu runs fine on the system, except for two issues…
- The network adapter will not work. I’ve tried many suggestions from forums, even downloaded the Realtek 8111e driver direct from realtek. It will not connect to anything (you may need to blacklist the wrong drivers, there are some 8 different models included in the linux driver package download).
- Current resolution, I installed a GB NIC PCI card, works great.
- I cannot get my Radeon HD6850 working, multiple issues.
- Any changes to the AMDCCLE configuration disappears after closing the interface. even if I open it right back up, the settings are back the way they were. Help with manually configuring AMDCCCLE
- Any time I restart the computer it hangs after “checking battery state [ok]“.
- This is when it loads the graphical settings to launch X.
- As a note, I have a dual monitor setup, both on the two DVI ports; however because one DVI port is a DVI-d I have to have my right monitor connected as monitor0 and my left one connected as monitor1 (this makes things backwards, moving the mouse to the right puts it on the left screen and vice versa, unless you specify it in the configuration.
- Current resolution for this problem (short incomplete version):
- Reboot into Ubuntu recovery mode from GRUB (good luck!).
- Mount/remount all devices and read/write.
- Then press enter to exit that screen.
- Then select root command prompt.
- Because the onboard NIC does not work, there is no point in selecting root command prompt with networking, as it won’t enable the PCI NIC.
- Now enter the following to remove all AMD video drivers from the system:
- learn more about the xorg.conf settings
- Hopefully you have manually created the deb packages for your ati drivers, if not, you can reboot now and use the default drivers for xorg to download the drivers and put them in the /root/amd6xxx directory on your system (you will need to create the amd6xxx directory under /root) and follow these instructions after booting back in to the recovery mode root command prompt after remounting devices as read/write, instructions above.
- You either already had the files, or you just created them (only follow the creating .deb files section), so we can move on to install the AMD drivers for the Radeon 6xxx series card.
- This should run without much of an issue, might be a couple of mini errors (file not found, skipping), but nothing to prevent the installation from finishing.
- And to finish up:
- I am not 100% sure the “effective=startup” part is necessary or even works.
- You can now reboot and cross your fingers.
- I have to do this every time I restart my system, and sometimes it does not work and I have to do it 2-5 times before I can get back in.
- There are also times when I boot and get 1 flickering screen and one working screen (both tinted like my background image).
- There are also times when I get one flickering screen and the other not, but both are nearly all white. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL initiates a reboot, so I know Ubuntu booted at least.
- There are some times when I get cloned displays in 1024×768 resolution (not my default or preferred).
Next up: Ubuntu 11.10 x64
apt-get purge -qq --no-download fglrx* xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon
rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf*
Xorg -configure
sudo /root/amd6xxx
./ati-driver-installer-11-9-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/oneiric
dpkg -i *.deb
aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=right --xinerama=on --effective=startup --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Any attempt at a total and complete resolution is still a work in progress…
I’ve been doing a bit of work lately,
- I have a new Rom installed on my HTC Evo, the MikG 2.3 Rom with Sense 2.1+3.0
- I’ve added the poorly placed in the top left corner Google +1 button to the site
- I am going to flash a new Rom on my Notion Ink Adam here in about three hours
- Finally got my Xbox 360 setup so I can get audio and video on my PC monitor (HD TV) and my TV
- Reimaged my laptop, three times… still having issues with it, going to have to spend most of tomorrow on it I fear
- Finally ordered a replacement fan for the top of my Thermaltake PC case, it has been acting up for about 12 months now!
- Not to mention a bunch of housework
All my apps are reinstalled, but not yet configured, Thank you Titanium Backup for helping with that, just bought the Pro License, a bit pricey, but’ll just eat at home this week!
It was either that or the bottom left… haven’t figured out where else to put it with this theme, but I’m looking.
I have to go mow the lawn first, it looks so bad I’ve started singing “Welcome to the Jungle” every time I go outside!
Video has been working for a couple of months, but I couldn’t find the adapter I needed to do the audio, so I bought another yesterday, paid too much for that too..
I hope it fits, the manufacturer claims they are 230mm fans in there now, but when I measured it with my tape measure it was only 203mm (fan size) and about 214mm from end to end of the case opening and I’m afraid I’ll have to remove the Motherboard to replace it…
So, deal with the Google +1 button where it is, I’ll probably not get around to moving it for 3 -12 months (I say that as I have a baby due in less than 4 months), I’ll try and get another 5 or so Android apps posted up this week, a write-up on my Evo and Adam Roms, and maybe I’ll even finally get pictures put up for the apps pages! I did take 383 screen shots on my Adam using the ShootMe app, but they all came out as blank black screens… so I’ll try again later. I’ve also added and updated my Notion Ink Adam Roms page, a LOT the last week or so, now make sure you head over and take a look! Doubt I’ll do the same for my Evo though, as they seem to have things well in hand on their own.
Lots of things going on, not enough time to tell about them. I am still running the Beast Rom v2.2.1 on my Notion Ink Adam, and not having any issues to complain about, I have used UnrEvoked on my HTC Evo to root it, removed the Sprint apps I didn’t want and started backing up with Clockwork Mod and Titanium Backup. Still running Ubuntu 10.10 x64 exclusively on my desktop, I’ve been working on learning Java and think I’m picking it up pretty quick, although there are nuances I still do not have down. Maybe after 4-6 months I’ll take an intermediate level course on Java and see if they can tell me the small things I am missing from not having an instructor. Some time around January I’ll start learning Android specifics, by then I should be getting up to speed on java graphics and UI interfaces, right now I am just doing console coding.
I lost a large quantity of data from my drives last week, there appears to be an issue with my external drive caddy, when I bootup sometimes one of the drives is not recognized, normally a reboot operation clears it right up. Last week I shut my systems down for a bad storm, in case we lost power for an extended time as the storm was about 2am. Well during startup it had no issue finding the drive that normally didn’t startup, but it did do a disk consistency check, which happens every now and then and no big deal I thought. A few hours after that I went to startup my virtual machine so I could work on my java code and VMware told me some VM drives were missing, I didn’t think much of it, as I had been rearranging and deleting some old VMs recently and started up my Android-SDK VM, launched Eclipse (I move to using Eclipse instead of Appcellerator’s Titanium Mobile Developer, because It has a code editor and Appcellerator decided not to include one…) Well it couldn’t find my files, so I started looking and my data store drive was there, had files in it, but all of my directories were missing!
First things first, I rebooted, thinking there was an issue mounting during startup, well it was the same when it came back up. I checked the trash, in case I accidentally deleted them, nothing was there. I moved to a terminal session and checked the drive space on my mounts and saw there was 173GB of data on my 1TB drive, but no files to show for it (previously there was over 750GB of data on the drive). Well I found a large portion of them in a .trash-1000 folder, not sure about most of you, but I copy every CD I’ve ever gotten since 1997 on to my hard drive as a backup, well that was the end of my backups for a large bit of it. Two days later I found another 140GB on my old Windows 7 boot drive that I apparently copied off of, but never removed the original. So I’m out about 55-65% of my backup data, most of which the CD’s are either missing or damaged beyond use. Probably 60-80% of my backups are either things I have never actually used, or only installed to see what it did, then uninstalled it. So I am not really out too much, just makes me feel empty inside… Most of what I lost that I actually use were my Microsoft disks, having been a Microsoft partner for about 4 years and working a lot with Virtual Machines I had everything stored in .iso format, and about 2 years ago Microsoft moved to .iso format and I was keeping up with all available software via the download site. So I basically lost everything that was released by MS in the last 2 years and since I am no longer a MS partner I no longer have access to those downloads. (this includes Win7 and Office 2010) I guess it is a good idea that I don’t run windows as my OS anymore!
Just a few quick update notes and then I’ll let you be on your way! I have finally received my Notion Ink Adam I do like it just as much as I thought I would, especially after replacing the stock rom! I have already put up 3 posts in regards to my Adam, so be sure to check them out. It appears that all of my hardware is fully functional and without defects, although I have not yet tried a video recording. Everything looks perfect! (except the screen protector, which I screwed up when I put on my Adam! Pics are up on the gallery post)
Also, I’ve been messing around with my home wifi settings and noticed some things (some of these I already knew, but I’m posting them, as I have not previously, or stated something different previously). I have a Cisco e3000 dual band 802.11n router with four 1GB Lan ports, and a USB port that I can attach a USB stick or USB harddrive to and access from the internet via ftp (very awesome and super cool!), I have a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer thumb drive attached right now, it supports user creation, passwords, and even security groups!
- apparently my Cisco e3000 Router powers cycles the 5GHz frequency prior to powering on the 2.4GHz frequency
- sometimes when resetting my router, I have to turn off wireless networking on my Android devices, then turn it back on or they won’t see the network
- It appears that the amount of time between restarting my wireless on the router and when it becomes available to devices is equal to the Beacon interval multiplied by the DTIM interval.
- My HTC Evo 4G does NOT support 5GHz 802.11n, only 2.4GHz (does not even see the 5GHz network I have), apparently the HTC Evo networking chip (bcm4329), not only comes in two models, one with dual band 2.4GHz & 5GHz and one without, is the same one in the Nexus1, Droid Incredible, GTab, iPhone 3GS & 4, iPod Touch, and iPad1 (who knows what else it is in!), and is a SoC with 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz, BT 2.1, and FM transceiver, I wonder if anyone has gotten the iPhone4 to do FM yet?
- My Google Chrome OS cr-48 netbook does do 802.11n 5GHz.
- My Notion Ink Adam does not do 5GHz, it only does 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n
As I’ve said, I’ve been messing with some of my network settings (specifically on my router) and I have found that a DTIM Interval setting of 6 on my 5GHz 802.11n settings works with my cr-48 Chrome OS netbook, but upping it to 7 causes intermittent connection issues. Changing the DTIM interval to 5 on the 2.4GHz b/g/n network works with my HTC Evo and Lenovo ThinkPad T410, but not the Notion Ink Adam which fails to connect to the network at all. The HTC Evo has sporatic issues connecting and maintaining that connection when the DTIM is set to 7, hopefully there is a hack out there that will let me enable the 5GHz wifi n (if possible) on the Evo, so I can switch it over to the 5GHz network and take advantage of the increased DTIM setting. On a side note, some research I did while working on this, here is a great document on understanding wifi network traffic, latency, roaming/multiple APs, and bandwidth overhead (actually a document on optimizing wifi for VOIP). This Cisco router’s documentation has some good descriptions of the wireless settings.
Ok, so I’ve learned a few things while I was typing this and made some more modifications, previously I was using a 20,000 millisecond beacon time with those DTIM settings that is why I was having connectivity issues, I have tried to figure out the maximum time between DTIM packets and maintain a steady signal between all of my devices (to decrease sleep mode battery drain when wifi is active) as part of my experiments to improve my Notion Ink Adam battery life (currently between 8 and 12 hours of normal+ use or 20-36 hours of minimal use).
Below are the settings I’ve tried and the results I have received from each
| Beacon | DTIM | time | result |
| 2000 | 6 | 12sec | stable connection -4 |
| 1500 | 7 | 10.5sec | connection loop -5 |
| 1500 | 10 | 15sec | connection loop -5 |
| 3000 | 10 | 30sec | connection loop -5 |
| 6000 | 10 | 1min | mostly stable |
| 6100 | 10 | 1min 1sec | connection loop -2 |
| 6600 | 10 | 1min 6sec | connection loop -3 |
| 7000 | 10 | 1min 10sec | connection loop -3 |
| 9000 | 10 | 1min 30sec | connection loop -1 |
| 12000 | 10 | 2min | connection loop -2 |
| 24000 | 10 | 4min | connection loop -1 |
1 – Evo stays connected for about 3 minutes before looping, Adam fails to maintain connection during obtaining IP Address
2 – Neither the Adam or the Evo can successfully make a connection
3 – Evo stays connected (tested 10 mins) without dropping, Adam fails to maintain connection during obtaining IP Address
4 – both my Evo and my Adam stay connected (tested 10 minutes) without dropping and I tested my Samsung moment with the same results
5 – the Evo stays connected and the Adam sometimes connects, then drops and won’t reconnect
*note – I have deleted many of the numbers I tested leaving only a few behind; however I left all of the entries marked with a “-1″ as it is note worthy to look into a pattern.
**double note – I killed a 100% battery charge on my Notion Ink Adam in about 4 hours testing this…
even set at 6000 and 10 I am still having connection issues with my Notion Ink Adam, it will connect, but only the “first time” after each power on. If it loses the signal for any reason it refuses to reconnect and continues the connection loop issue. So right now I am just going to leave things that way and see how it goes for a few days.
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