Calling occupants of interplanetary craft ( Or just Ubuntu Users)

[NewtSoup]

4 minutes ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

Error 17 occurred two years of running time ago, and it's just now causing trouble?  "Insert bootable media" probably means your BIOS is trying to start from the wrong drive; your boot order may have gotten messed up when you pulled the 3 TB drive out of the system.

Ahh the insert bootable media was occuring before I removed the 3TB making the computer difficult to restart.  Computer was easier to restart after removing said 3TB drive.
 

The boot order is

USB / Card Reader
Samsung 1GB
256gb SSD

and the 3TB was disabled as a boot device as the computer was never to boot from it.
 

[NewtSoup]

Re-Reading the data:

Error 17 did not occur 2 years ago.  It occurred today and the drive has had a total power on time of 2 years and 22 days.. roughly.

The SMART stats indicate that the drive is basically in good health.  The spin up time is occasionally too slow.  There are no bad sectors and only 1 count of bad sector pending where smart thinks there might be an error. 

to reduce the chance of a spin up fail i'm simply not going to restart it until such time as I get a replacement main drive, unless I absolutely have to.

[PB666]

4 hours ago, NewtSoup said:

Once again - Monkey Feathers!

Hmmm, if this gets by the moderators . . . . .lol. 

Anyway, new motherboards have OS protected state firmware. Once you install an operating system and set it as boot the mobo hands certain controls over to the OS. If you remove the OS you may need to clear the Bios and go about resetting the drive. Definitely don't swap between  Win8, 10 drive and Linux based. When Win10 becomes the boot partition it will try to run the show to the exclusion of all others, this generally means doing a cold reset of the MoBo (pulling the battery out, clearing the CMOS, and starting with new drives). 

[NewtSoup]

Monkey Feathers is from Avatar: The Last Airbender

Possibly a topic for a different thread but I've often thought about expletives, how they are used and what they mean.  I feel that they only have the meaning we give to them.  Which is why I never call anyone "noob", newbie yes.  But "noob" never because it's used in such a derogatory fashion in online gaming I find it exceptionally rude and right up there with the vernacular it's replacing.

[PB666]

On 3/13/2018 at 10:19 PM, NewtSoup said:

Oh I'm just window shopping.

I'll be getting a single large capacity spinny drive for media and documents and a fast SSD for system and games. 

@Green Baron it's "she" or Ruth btw

I used a green drive for long term storage, it unspins when not being used, everything else is SSD. They are slow, the fast one chip (pci express speed) into the mobo and for the short cards they are rather expensive. 

[a real girl, arrrgggghhhh, everyone hide ] Ironically, when i read that first I thought why does he name his computer Ruth. Gender confuses geeks and nerds. 

[NewtSoup]

22 minutes ago, PB666 said:

[a real girl, arrrgggghhhh, everyone hide ] Ironically, when i read that first I thought why does he name his computer Ruth. Gender confuses geeks and nerds. 

That's why I put my picture up in place of Valentina.  Subtle hint.  Didn't work.

Edited March 18, 2018 by NewtSoup

[NewtSoup]

10 minutes ago, NewtSoup said:

They are slow, the fast one chip (pci express speed) into the mobo and for the short cards they are rather expensive. 

Not sure what you mean here.

 

[PB666]

2 hours ago, NewtSoup said:

That's why I put my picture up in place of Valentina.  Subtle hint.  Didn't work.

 I thought it was a movie actress, cause i'm old and don't know any of the actresses anymore except when they show up in jail or on PBS funding drives. Oddly if i knew you were from Lester would have known better, cause English recycles their actors like crazy, and all I watch are English dramas and mysteries. 

2 hours ago, NewtSoup said:

Not sure what you mean here.

The most recent mobos have a small slot, about 3 cm which fit a variable length solid state hard drive, some are like 5 cm in length, other are longer. Super thin, maybe a third of a millimeter thick. Drives last time i checked were 500 to1900 USD each. Much higher transfer rates than 300 GB/sec. 

[NewtSoup]

30 minutes ago, PB666 said:

 I thought it was a movie actress, cause i'm old and don't know any of the actresses anymore except when they show up in jail or on PBS funding drives. Oddly if i knew you were from Lester would have known better, cause English recycles their actors like crazy, and all I watch are English dramas and mysteries. 

I am an actor, just not well known yet.  Done some film extra work been in a few stage plays, done work for hospitals for doctor training ( PACE exams ).  Hopefully I won't end up in prison.
 

32 minutes ago, PB666 said:

The most recent mobos have a small slot, about 3 cm which fit a variable length solid state hard drive, some are like 5 cm in length, other are longer. Super thin, maybe a third of a millimeter thick. Drives last time i checked were 500 to1900 USD each. Much higher transfer rates than 300 GB/sec. 

Oh yes, my motherboard has a slot for one of these - mSata - they start at round £125 GBP these days for 500gb (~$170USD )

Some people say I wont make it as an actor and I'm too old but I will not be discouraged! I keep in mind that Morgan Freeman didn't get his big break until he was 55.. which gives me 8 years to hone my craft!  It's doable!

 

[PB666]

10 minutes ago, NewtSoup said:

I am an actor, just not well known yet.  Done some film extra work been in a few stage plays, done work for hospitals for doctor training ( PACE exams ).  Hopefully I won't end up in prison.

Some people say I wont make it as an actor and I'm too old but I will not be discouraged! I keep in mind that Morgan Freeman didn't get his big break until he was 55.. which gives me 8 years to hone my craft!  It's doable!

Well it was a good guess then. At least it makes me feel a bit younger.

Quote

£125 GBP these days for 500gb (~$170USD )

Yeah the longer ones run in this range (actually that price is lower than the ones I saw around October), but I haven't found a case and Mobo combo where the stick actually works. The ones that actually fit inside the case (don't require a hacksaw to cut out part of the drive bays) are expensive. On one Mobo the long ones ran into the memory ports. So it was a bit of coercion to buy the shorter ones and pay out the nose for them. 

[NewtSoup]

9 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Yeah the longer ones run in this range (actually that price is lower than the ones I saw around October), but I haven't found a case and Mobo combo where the stick actually works. The ones that actually fit inside the case (don't require a hacksaw to cut out part of the drive bays) are expensive. On one Mobo the long ones ran into the memory ports. So it was a bit of coercion to buy the shorter ones and pay out the nose for them. 

My MB is a Gigabyte GA-Z77-UDH3 1.1  (you can't buy these any more, I looked )

The mSata port is designed to hold the card at both ends and is about 5cm long so it would actually fit one of these Samsung 850 Evo 500gb

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-mSATA-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B078WQKL4X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1521418688&sr=8-2&keywords=mSata+500gb

I may consider getting one.

 

The port sits right beside the processor socket and doesn't foul the memory slots.  However the cooler for the processor does so I can't use all four slots  - I could possibly fit the cooler back to front to open up those slots but I have 16gb ram so that's enough for the time being.

Edited March 19, 2018 by NewtSoup

[PB666]

1 hour ago, NewtSoup said:

My MB is a Gigabyte GA-Z77-UDH3 1.1  (you can't buy these any more, I looked )

The mSata port is designed to hold the card at both ends and is about 5cm long so it would actually fit one of these Samsung 850 Evo 500gb

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-mSATA-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B078WQKL4X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1521418688&sr=8-2&keywords=mSata+500gb

I may consider getting one.

 

The port sits right beside the processor socket and doesn't foul the memory slots.  However the cooler for the processor does so I can't use all four slots  - I could possibly fit the cooler back to front to open up those slots but I have 16gb ram so that's enough for the time being.

Get an aftermarket cooling fan

[PB666]

1 hour ago, NewtSoup said:

My MB is a Gigabyte GA-Z77-UDH3 1.1  (you can't buy these any more, I looked )

The mSata port is designed to hold the card at both ends and is about 5cm long so it would actually fit one of these Samsung 850 Evo 500gb

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-mSATA-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B078WQKL4X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1521418688&sr=8-2&keywords=mSata+500gb
 

They're Z270 now, thats for the gen 7 and gen 8 CPus, you must have gen 5 or 6. Dont buy the GB-270A, its very picky about memory, youll be paying top dollar for mem. I have 16 gb mem in both of my systems. You will never need more than two slots.

- - - - -

Yeah, thats the right profile, but it says in big nasty red letters, this item does not ship to the United States.

Damn, i was looking at the one Tb card, just £309. US price is 329 USD. 

[NewtSoup]

I've no plan on buying a new mainboard.  Mine is fine, my processor is fine.  The only thing I may do is upgrade the graphics card and overclock the CPU,  3570K - I've had it run happily on the current cooler @ 4.0 ghz.  The cooler is an arctic freezer pro 7 the best and quietest air cooler at the time.  It is quite big though.

 

[PB666]

28 minutes ago, NewtSoup said:

I've no plan on buying a new mainboard.  Mine is fine, my processor is fine.  The only thing I may do is upgrade the graphics card and overclock the CPU,  3570K - I've had it run happily on the current cooler @ 4.0 ghz.  The cooler is an arctic freezer pro 7 the best and quietest air cooler at the time.  It is quite big though.

 

Yeah it gobbled up your mem slot. 

[steve_v]

12 hours ago, NewtSoup said:

I'm guessing error 17 is what was causing the motherboard to freak at post?

Sounds to me like the drive is dropping off the bus, if it did this at boot and it's your boot drive: Insert boot media.
Could be a dodgy cable, could be the drive electronics dying. I'd go for the easy one first - swap cables and sata ports.
And set up a real backup, if you don't have one already, it makes "is this drive about to die" situations far less worrying.
 

12 hours ago, NewtSoup said:

The rest of it - can someone help me interpret the data?

Everything looks fine, except for this:

Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       1

Which indicates a media defect that the drive is yet to deal with. A bad sector in the old language.
To force the drive to reallocate that sector, you need to try writing to it. But reallocated sectors are generally considered a Bad Thing, and cause to replace a disk if it holds important data.
I'd run an long self-test (smartctl --test=long /dev/sd[x]) to see if it picks up any more. Result @ smartctl -a /dev/sd[x].
For drives that matter, I have self-tests set up as a cron job, short tests daily and long tests weekly. But that's probably just my paranoia talking.

 

1 hour ago, NewtSoup said:

arctic freezer pro 7 the best and quietest air cooler at the time

And still hard to beat.

[Nuke]

turns out the only distro im any good with is raspbian. up to writing device drivers (i2c joystick).

Edited March 20, 2018 by Nuke

[steve_v]

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

turns out the only distro im any good with is raspbian.

Which is almost Debian, upon which Ubuntu is based. All three have a lot in common, and all three are full of "Debianisms" that set them apart from other distros.

 

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

writing device drivers

That's deep territory, into which most never venture. Good stuff.

[Nuke]

31 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Which is almost Debian, upon which Ubuntu is based. All three have a lot in common, and all three are full of "Debianisms" that set them apart from other distros.

 

That's deep territory, into which most never venture. Good stuff.

cant say i like ubuntu. last thing i played around with was mint. maybe il try straight debian again. idk. as for the drivers it was an input and i quickly found documentation on the uinput library and i2c library thanks to google and had working code an hour later. cant do that on windows (i would have still been downloading the sdk). 

Edited March 20, 2018 by Nuke

[steve_v]

8 minutes ago, Nuke said:

cant say i like ubuntu

Agreed. I've used many distros over the years and Ubuntu is tied with RedHat for least time running and least liked. Used Debian up until pretty recently, but went back to Gentoo (after ~11 years, it's as awesome as I remember) to avoid the systemd / pulseaudio / networkmanager / gnome "one Linux" railroad. That and the extremely buggy KDE release in Debian stable at the moment.

 

8 minutes ago, Nuke said:

i quickly found documentation on the uinput library and i2c library and had working code an hour later. cant do that on windows. 

Neat, innit?

Edited March 20, 2018 by steve_v

[Nibb31]

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

cant say i like ubuntu. last thing i played around with was mint. maybe il try straight debian again. idk. as for the drivers it was an input and i quickly found documentation on the uinput library and i2c library thanks to google and had working code an hour later. cant do that on windows (i would have still been downloading the sdk). 

I've been using Solus Budgie for a couple of weeks and it's a keeper. It's very slick, polished, fast and stable. Compared to Ubuntu or Mint, the software repo is curated, which means that there is much less junk available, but on the other hand, whatever is there is properly compiled for the platform, fits the desktop environment perfectly, and the packages are more recent. It's quality over quantity and I haven't yet not found something I need.

Edited March 20, 2018 by Nibb31

[NewtSoup]

Aaand I'm back in Windows

I can't believe both my main drives have failed in the same week.

Lost my media collection, lost my save games, everything will have to be installed again on a new drive

I just hope the HD103 can be spun up one more time to rescue my KSP saves   and the documents folders

So now I'm on Windows 10 on a 256gb SSD.

I guess I'll be playing Elite Dangerous for a bit.

 

In a year, after windows has finished insisting on updating absolutely barking everything.  

<insert "Girl from Ipanema" here>

[NewtSoup]

Just ordered a Samsung 500 GB 860 EVO Sata III 64L V NAND from Amazon.  Can't afford it but there we go.

Wondered about going the mSata route but it's an unknown to me so I'll stick with what I know

 

So now, what distro do I install?  I'm so used to Debian based, I know a lot of people don't like the Debian based stuff but it does just work!  I find it reliable and well supported for gaming.  So I think Ubuntu 16.04 will go back on.  However if anyone has some neat ideas then do let me know!

Edited March 20, 2018 by NewtSoup

[Nibb31]

I just suggested Solus

https://solus-project.com/

Edited March 20, 2018 by Nibb31

[NewtSoup]

So you did, I'm looking at it and considering it.

I'm also creating an ubuntu 18.04 live media on a USB stick.  I'll have a play with that this evening.

I've played with Raspbian too but I don't think I want it as my main OS for gaming. I just want reliable and works with the minimum of fuss and to not be Win 10.  Which has taken a monumental 3 hours to settle down after boot! ( updates and microsoft doing microsoft stuff ) 3 hours of it downloading random junk, doing updates I didn't ask for and thrashing my poor little SSD to death.

Nope it's still at it.

Edited March 20, 2018 by NewtSoup