ACPI and Windows 7/Windows Installation Disc

This will be a quick one, if you find that for some reason, a known-working installation of Windows 7 on a known-working hard drive won't actually boot properly, or if you're attempting to install Windows 7 and you get caught on an infinite loop with a message screen that looks like this (and no matter what you do, you always come back  to it):

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l56/ASOBNOFX/02_06.png

Head into your BIOS and look for the option for ACPI. Enable it, I don't exactly know why, but Windows 7 seems to require it to function. Here's further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Configuration_and_Power_Interface

Moving Hard Drives, NTLDR is missing, Partions missing

 (The following post works under the assumption you're using SATA hard drives and Windows 7. Don't worry about master/slave configurations, I believe for the most part it is largely a relic not needed for the average home-PC user)


If you're like me, you'd use something like a dying hard drive as an excuse to get inside the guts of your computer, dust it out as much as possible, re-arrange and re-organise the cables, and plug everything in so it's neat and tidy for better air-flow. If you're not like me... you should probably do that at some point (unless you're of those people who spends more time with cable management and routing when first setting up a compute than you do actually playing with your brand new toy... then carry on), it's healthy. But if you're also like me (or again, if you're not, and just found yourself doing what I did) and you move other hard drives around, and the cables, and you plug it all back in, in an order that it wasn't originally in, you may find that when you go to boot up that your computer is throwing up the lovely "NTLDR is missing" error. This means, as simply as possible, that your BIOS can't find Windows/An Operating System.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKj_kDrJphnDfDGhU3WtazsCqBOUaXihf4pSNUbu4jcmaYKzKnNGTl2E_9coLc2RjOglOah2xqvyAyxPLW29M5SnYJjen9XMjb5YPmAR90YEgQWr6ORCLPnyNixNJvn6zxv57EAyWc-ek_/s640/ntldr+missing+Sebastiano.jpeg

Don't panic.


I know you might be thinking: 'uh oh, did I break a cable? Did I accidentally wipe a hard drive with magnets? Static shock? ANOTHER DEAD HARD DRIVE?!!?'; but truthfully speaking the error is 99% of the time benign in a situation like this, so don't panic. What you need to do, if you have more than one hard drive, is identify which one contains your Operating System. If you're like me, you put a note on each hard drive so you know what it contains, and so you can identify it easier in BIOS. If you didn't do that, maybe you at least memorised the part number of the hard drive so you can cross reference it. If you didn't do that... we'll you've got some detective work to do.


But don't panic.


First things first: check that all the power cables are connected properly, and re-seat the SATA/IDE cables if you have to. The next part is easy: All you got to do is get into your BIOS, and re-arrange your boot priority so that a hard disk comes first. And then, you'll need to go into another menu to make sure the BIOS attempts to load the hard drive with your Operating System on it. Depending on your BIOS, this could be all in one, or require multiple menus. It varies...

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/34/images/bootcdrom.jpg

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRB02N85krVcrDmiwtfdYfRLsmNTxs_YicIQRdu8xzyHIeFy9hqq4cUf_O4

Alright, now that we've done that, we shouldn't be getting the NTLDR error anymore... success! Except... oh wait, you're missing a partion or two... this is a little bit trickier than the previous steps, but thankfully if you're using Windows 7, it's simplified. You need to open up a tool kit called Disk Management (it's in control panel, under Administrative Tools), but in Windows 7, you can just type 'disk management' into the search bar in the start menu, and it will bring it up... handy. It will look like this:

http://www.partition-tool.com/images/resource/win7-extend3-b.gif

If you keep your My Computer screen open with a list of the active partitions, you should be able to easily identify what's no longer showing up. Simply right click that partition in Disk Management, and click 'Change Drive Letter and Path', and then pick a letter. And it should, now be accessible to you. Hopefully it works out for you, because this is the process I went through to get some partitions back.

No Sound from Audio-Out, but sound from USB Headset

On New Years, one of my hard drives failed. It contained my Operating System (Win 7/64bit) but not much else... so nothing of value was really lost. However since then, I've had a week of tweaking, tuning, problem-solving, and returning to the basics of building a computer just to get things functioning properly again. One of the strangest issues I had after I had installed a fresh copy of Windows, was that my otherwise normally-functional audio device (inbuilt soundcard on EVGA 780i FTW) was not working... and not just not working, but refusing to show up in Windows at all... I spent a few hours with different drivers and configurations and numerous restarts, and finally cultivating in yet another fresh Windows Install before I worked out the problem... and then I felt stupid.

If you have a Modern...ish (2004 onwards) computer, you'll probably have a case and a motherboard which will have two different audio cables, called HD Audio, and AC'97, these cables allow you to connect the front panel of your case to your sound card, allowing you to use the front I/O panel audio, which is usually just an headphone jack. Like this:

source: http://ask.creative.com/wwimages/audio_int/xfi/xfi_extremeaudio_frontpanel2a.jpg

And of course... this:

source: http://cdnsupport.gateway.com/s/Cases/GERSHWIN/FRNTPNL_AUDIO_RCA_BAY.jpg

Should be pretty self-explanatory. Anyway, my sound card was not working, but, curiously, my USB headset was... this lead me to falsely believe my sound was perfectly functional, because I plugged that in before my speakers. Turns out I was wrong, most USB headsets actually contain a tiny driver and sound hardware to produce noise, they usually don't rely on Windows. When I plugged my speakers in and there was no sound (and Windows refused to even acknowledge anything was plugged in), I figured something was up with the driver, no that was fine (actually it became corrupted but there's neither here or there) and after banging my head against a wall trying to work out what was up, I ended up just deciding to look up what AC'97 stood for, which, after a few page hops, lead me to this sentence on Wikipedia:

"The different signal assignments can cause trouble when AC'97 front panel dongles are used with HDA motherboards and vice versa. A loud audio passage may make the HDA motherboard with AC'97 dongle believe that headphones and microphones being plugged and unplugged hundreds of times per second. An AC'97 motherboard with an HDA dongle will route the 5 V audio supply (silence) to the speakers instead of the desired audio."

Welp, I'm an idiot. So I unplugged the AC'97 cable, and then sound returned to normal. Message of the story is: Don't plug HD Audio and AC'97 in together at the same time if you value your sound.

False Tech-Otomy

I'm not an expert on computers, as much as I like to think I am.

I make mistakes, I run into errors, I run into computer issues I don't know about. I google a lot of things.

But doing all this, means that I have learned a few things along the way, and I can still impress less technically-apt people with my "1337 h4x t3ch skIlls" because I found out how to fix a common issue. Or because I learned quite possibly the most valuable skill someone who works with computer will ever know (next to googling): learning to seperate the actual, valuable and useful information, from the crap and mis-information of the internet.

This blog is about me, coming across the various technical issues I face when I work with computers, and how I end up either fixing the issue... or sweeping it to the side so no one notices it.

If you read this blog, thanks, I hope you find it useful. If you know something I don't, have comments or criticisms to hurl, by all means go for it. I welcome it!

Disclaimer: Don't take this page as absolute gospel on how to fix an issue, there are millions of variables that could make you what need to do radically different than what I had to do. I take no responsibility for anything that happens with you using this blogs resources. Use at your own risk.