Mr. Choc-Ice
20-03-2000, 09:39
We've been reminded a number of times to make sure we bring our installation disks with us to i3. I thought I'd reinforce that with my sorry tale.
My machine is (or was) a dual boot Win98/WinNT system. Last week, I installed MS Visual Studio under both installs. Unfortunately, the install to WinNT failed. For whatever reason, WinNT has never been as stable on my home machine as my work machine and experience tells me that as soon as something goes wrong, more trouble will follow.
Sure enough, WinNT became much less stable over the next few days with processes refusing to terminate when I shutdown or restarted, and for some reason, my mouse kept slowing to a crawl even though everything else was running smoothly.
I decided to cut my losses, remove WinNT, and just use my (stable) Win98 install for i3. This was a shame as I like to use my second processor for Q3A but I'd rather have everything stable.
Unfortunately, when I next booted Win98, I found that Q3A would crash on startup (every time) and the mouse slowdown thing had crept over to Win98.
For the sake of a few hours, I decided to reinstall Win98 so last night, I formatted my C: drive and began a fresh install.
Now this is not normally a big deal. I've sensibly put my apps, data, and swap file on seperate partitions and I can now do a full Win98 install (including installing drivers for all my hardware) in less than an hour.
Then things started going wrong. Setup insisted that my C: drive was in HPFS format. Scandisk found errors on every single partition. Partition Magic insisted that my partition table was garbage, and whatever I did with fdisk just made matters worse (two D: drives anyone?).
The long and the short of it is:
Deletion and recreation of every single partition. One hour of formatting. One hour of installing.
I've now got the cleanest Win98 install in Christendom and completely empty Apps, Data, and Swap partitions.
I've now got four days to reinstall all of my apps, all of my games, and download all the maps, patches, and mods I need.
It's a good job I love all this _****_!
So what ever you do, BRING YOUR DISKS!
Choc.
My machine is (or was) a dual boot Win98/WinNT system. Last week, I installed MS Visual Studio under both installs. Unfortunately, the install to WinNT failed. For whatever reason, WinNT has never been as stable on my home machine as my work machine and experience tells me that as soon as something goes wrong, more trouble will follow.
Sure enough, WinNT became much less stable over the next few days with processes refusing to terminate when I shutdown or restarted, and for some reason, my mouse kept slowing to a crawl even though everything else was running smoothly.
I decided to cut my losses, remove WinNT, and just use my (stable) Win98 install for i3. This was a shame as I like to use my second processor for Q3A but I'd rather have everything stable.
Unfortunately, when I next booted Win98, I found that Q3A would crash on startup (every time) and the mouse slowdown thing had crept over to Win98.
For the sake of a few hours, I decided to reinstall Win98 so last night, I formatted my C: drive and began a fresh install.
Now this is not normally a big deal. I've sensibly put my apps, data, and swap file on seperate partitions and I can now do a full Win98 install (including installing drivers for all my hardware) in less than an hour.
Then things started going wrong. Setup insisted that my C: drive was in HPFS format. Scandisk found errors on every single partition. Partition Magic insisted that my partition table was garbage, and whatever I did with fdisk just made matters worse (two D: drives anyone?).
The long and the short of it is:
Deletion and recreation of every single partition. One hour of formatting. One hour of installing.
I've now got the cleanest Win98 install in Christendom and completely empty Apps, Data, and Swap partitions.
I've now got four days to reinstall all of my apps, all of my games, and download all the maps, patches, and mods I need.
It's a good job I love all this _****_!
So what ever you do, BRING YOUR DISKS!
Choc.