Or, perhaps a better title to this posting would be 'Meltdown!' I think I prefer to use the title of one of the songs from my favorite 80's band, Tears For Fears. Anyway, in my last post, I was having trouble playing music CDs on my system. I actually found at least two viable solutions to the problem (which I can share if anyone's interested), but I never got a chance to use them. I was in the process of shutting down my machine, so I could move a jumper, and my system just...died. After rebooting, it took me a bit to realize that my first HD partition was missing. This, of course, was where I installed OS 3.9, and, since the environment itself was still running, I knew that the partition was still there, especially since DH1 and DH2 were also still present. After running a few tests, I determined that my I'd indeed had had a meltdown, of my hard drive. After a few futile attempts to save my installation, I scrapped it, and started over from scratch, all the way down to pre-WB 3.1. (I had, this early in the process, absolutely nothing to lose, except a few environmental configs). So, I reinstalled, solved the CDDA problem, but now...
A whole slew of new problems, which may, or may not be related to my installing BB1 and BB2, and also having upgraded the software for my CyberVision 64/3D. Here's a short list of what I'm dealing with:
1. Can't make my VGA monitor hold an image, it crashes the system, or just goes black. Usually, I have to power down. Note: I was scrupulous in checking my monitor's refresh rate, and other specs.
2. Can't launch any programs by double clicking. System either hangs, or gives me the RABSOD ('red and black screen of death').
3. HD died again. This may be caused by the fact that I still have to do a soft-reboot (CTRL-A-A), after a hard reboot, to get the machine to mount the CD. I think I may have to replace this (hard) drive, and I definitely need a better solution to the CD mounting problem.
4. My floppy drives (which I spent over an hour each disassembling down to the screws, and blasting with three cans of compressed air) refuse to read or write any disks EXCEPT the WB installation disks. I don't know if its the drives, or the (rather old) floppies that came with the system. (Thing is, I have been able to format the disks to 720 on one of my PCs, and do some small, 'randomly successful' file transfers with them.) Lately, I've taken to burning a CD on one of my PCs, and leaving the session open, for transporting/transferring files.)
Right now, I'm going to 'slowly back away', and try to reclaim the scattered shards of my life in time for the holidays (bah! humbug!). And, grit my teeth until 'company' goes home, so I can get back to what's REALLY important!
:pissed:
