More Awesome Than You!

Ran into a nasty, nasty over the weekend and my virus cleanups can't get it all. Soooo since my pc is strictly a gaming PC with no personal info or anything saved on it other than husband's wrestling promo pics. I was just going to reinstall windows and reformat the harddrive to clear up the nasty thing that liked to mascarade as a windows security alert.

Problem number one: Alienware (where I got my pc, and am slightly regretting) gave me a faulty factory settings respawn disc. I put it in and suddenly my pc tries to import photos to Fotomat.

Okay whatever, I have all my driver cds and all that so I'll just do a clean wipe and not worry about factory settings. So I pull out my Windows Recovery CD they gave me.

No Window product serial number anywhere on the CD. Still okay, I found the product key by going through my paper work.

Running Windows XP setup and I come across problems, the setup is asking me for SCSI and some other things with initials. Now, I like to pretend that I'm computer savvy. But when I come across new things, I kinda need things color coded and labelled. For the life me, nothing I can find within the items I got from Alienware mention SCSI ANYWHERE.

When I try to make setup look for itself, it fails to find it. The only floppy disc I got from Alienware says SATA Disc. Is this the magical floppy I need that has all the things Windows setup wants?

Why couldn't things happen automagically? All the stupid nasties I get are all automagic. Why can't the things I NEED to work right away with no direction of me, DON'T?

Anyways, feel free to point and laugh, but help would be appreciated. Anything to avoid the PC Repair shop. I don't really feel right paying $90 for a reinstall and a reformat.

Ignore the SCSI thing, that's just asking if you need some custom driver, but you probably don't.

Well, the first time I tried to skip it, it said it couldn't find the blah blah and exited setup.

OKay, I have to ask...but this has been bugging me for some time.

What the heck is your avatar about?

Fanart.

It's supposed to be Atton and The Exile from KOTOR II by Aimo.

Full version of it:

http://aimostudio.com/gallery/images/072.jpg


I resized a bunch of her stuff to over-ride the default Sim Paintings. This one was one of my favs and it fit as an avatar, so I used it. =p

That link doesn't work, and which one is which?

Bah, sorry she must not allow direct linking.

www.aimostudio.com


Should take you to her main site though.

Atton is the black haired male and The Exile is the female.

That site lost me. I don't read Arabic, sorry.

Have you tried putting that floppy disk into the drive and going into My Computer, then right-clicking the floppy drive icon and clicking on Explore?  that would at least tell you whether the thing you need is there.

SATA relates to your hard drive, so it's probably the driver for that or something.  Not much help I know, but just thought I'd mention it!

I believe some motherboards needs drivers to be able to run SATA-discs as system discs. I know mine did and we had to copy them to a floppy that Windows asked for in the beginning of the installation.

My guess is that if you have a SATA-disc as system disc the floppy you found is what it's asking for.

Mmkay, thanks everyone. I'm trying to get this figured out.

Hopefully I'll be able to do it on my own NEXT TIME. (knocks wood)

Would that be the wonderful Winfixer pop up?

Mmm, I dunno. It would say stuff like "You have a virus! Click here to download a free scan!" "A program is attempting to send to an unknown source!" "You have over the minimum 7 spyware blah blah"

"Dlasse.exe has terminated unexpectantly. Windows is shutting down!"

But then it wouldn't shut down. The box just vanished.

Then every once and awhile it would pull up my IE and take me to antispywarebox.com for a FREE SCAN!

These programs and the people who create them are a total menace!  Watch out too for a company calling itself InKline Global and read what it says here.

http://bmonday.com/archive/2006/03/31/3024.aspx (http://bmonday.com/archive/2006/03/31/3024.aspx)

Yeah the first clue was the fact that it was MICROSOFT telling me to go somewhere other than MICROSOFT for something.

I'm pretty sure they don't do that whole.... cooperation thing.

I was just curious. I had the Winfixer happen to me (sounds a lot like what you are describing) but Norton and Ad-aware couldn't get rid of it. Finally removed it with Spysweeper (I don't know a thing about reinstalling Windows and/or reformatting, so glad I didn't have do that).

Some motherboards (chipsets) require that SATA drivers be installed at the beginning of an installation of WinXP, probably because SATA wasn't around in 2001 and so XP doesn't recognize your SATA drives (assuming you have SATA drives!). I've not had to do this myself since I have SCSI drives in my PC, but as I understand it you should get a message at the beginning of the XP installation process to the effect of press a function key (is it F6?) if you need to install third-party drivers. I'm guessing you need to say "yes" when asked if you need to install SCSI drivers, and then insert the SATA disc you have from Alienware and follow the directions.

Sooo, when trying to run setup for windows xp home edition. It says "cannot find viasrai.sys" and then shuts down set up.

Comments, suggestions, point and laugh?

Get XP Pro Corporate. Home edition is spyware.

Hmmm . . . .

1)  Have you already reformatted the disk, so there's nothing on it? Some versions of Windows setup will automatically reformat the drive before installing (or at least ask if you want to),while others will only reinstall/refresh an existing installation if there is one. It sounds like you need to install to a clean drive.

2)  Does your motherboard have a VIA chipset? A Google search turns up no mention of "viasrai.sys" and it's not a file I have on my Intel-based PC. The via in viasrai.sys makes me think you do have a VIA chipset, and it may be that you need to install the chipset drivers before you can install Windows (or at least during the early stages of installing Windows).  :P

After poking around VIA's Web site, I'm guessing the missing file is viasraid.sys, which would be the RAID/SATA driver for your chipset.

http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=20&threadid=72561&enterthread=y

Yeah, that was a typo. It was a viasraid.sys file that's missing, but I've kinda given up on trying to fix it on my own. I obiviously am not teh awesomer. Just going to take to someone who is more awesome than I and have them fix me up right.

It would've been nice if that respawn disc I got actually worked. Charged me 40 bucks for it and it does jack.

Stupid Alienware.

Jelenedra, you need to persevere!  The first time I opened SimPE, I thought, hell, I'll never understand this, it's so technical!  Now, I won't say I understand it now, but I can do a lot more with it than I could back then, and only because I'm obstinate!

I am getting better. I was so afraid of SimPe for the longest. Then I learned how to add genetic codes to custom skintones and using SimPe was the only way. Had to swallow my fear and suck it up. Now I got binned hairs and genetic friendly skintones. Whoo!

I just got to get smarter about my OS.

I suppose to some extent it depends on what you can afford to do - if you can't afford to pay someone, you have to learn or go without!

Mind you, I just hope I don't have to reinstall for a good while yet, the thought scares me as I have so much stuff I don't want to lose sitting on my second HD, and although I've been assured that reformatting my main drive and reinstalling the OS won't affect theat drive, I just don't really believe it - and I'm not really able to get the case off and unplug the 2nd drive these days.  (I can't even do a system restore back very far as all my darn restore points have disappeared - which seems to happen at regular intervals!  (Annoying, the things are still around, taking up space, but I can't use them!

Well, if you're scared about losing info on the second drive, just make sure to remember to pull it out before reformating or anything like that.

Now that's more than what I trust myself to do, but you might be different. =)

I don't have a problem affording outside help. I just wanted to see if I could manage it myself. I had saved my PC from two nasty nasties before, (again, one was one of those self reinstalling types) and I was hoping to do so again this time.

It just seemed to me that reinstalling would've been an easier way to fix the problem. As this particular nasty was MEAN.

I learned my lesson there. =p

And it's always a good thing to find out where you need to beef up your knowledge. =)

True, but it's not knowledge (or lack of it) that prevents me from getting the second HD out of the case, it's muscle and being able to get down on the floor and get up again!

Ah, yeah that was my biggest beef with fiddling with my tower's fans was unhooking everything to pull it out of the desk only to shove it back 5 minutes later and hook everything back up.

I'm afraid of spiders and after seeing one the size of my hand climb out from behind my printer at work, I'm afraid to get down underneath my desk!  :o

I don't like spiders either, though we don't get them quite that big here!  (My cat, unfortunately, does like them, and on the odd occasion when I've seen him eat one, it's made me feel more like puking than ever!

It was at work and our cleaning crew doesn't like leaning over the counter to clean behind out PCs. So when we all got upgraded with nicey, nice PCs the tech crew stirred up all the dust behind the old monitors so as the guy was carrying off my printer...There it was, big as can be, with a nice fiddle back.

I screamed....SO loud. I think I gave everyone else heart attacks. (I'm the quiet one at work)

The tech guy though... he just grabbed a paper towel and picked it up and crushed it.

*shudders*

Then he proceeded to show everyone the spider to everyone that didn't see it. Its insides SMELLED, it was so big.

YUCK.

That's really disgusting!  I wonder if you could report him for cruelty to animals?

Hah! Why would want him to do that?

He killed the spider that was big enough to kill kittens!

Well, I have met people who love spiders and keep them as pets!  and funnily enough, the only spider I ever saw that didn't make my skin crawl was a tarantula!

That's because they're fuzzy wuzzy!

I know, they just don't look so disgusting, somehow!

I think it's the fur that makes it seem like they need to be petted, not smushed.

Well, the guy who owned this one was showing it to all our seven-year-olds at a wildlife park talk, it was his personal pet and he was extremely fond of it!

Since you have to deliberately choose to delete a partition or reformat a drive, you can't erase the second HDD by accident—that is, unless you mistake for the C: drive.   :)

You CAN reformat a non-boot partition from within Windows, but not the C: drive itself (or whichever logical drive contains Windows)—Windows will not erase itself. To reformat the C: drive, you generally need to boot to DOS from a floppy disk and run the Format command; alternately, you can boot a WinXP CD that allows you to reformat/repartition your hard drive (no versions of fdisk I know of support NTFS, so the latter is a better option). To delete/modify partitions, you need to run Fdisk.  I suppose there are third-party utilities that will do some of this, but I haven't used them, except for the drive-transfer utility that is/was available from Western Digital.

In the end, though, it is always a good idea to periodically back up any personal data, including downloads and saved games. With a utility like Norton Ghost, you can made an image of all or some of the data on a drive and save it as an ISO file to DVD or another hard drive—Ghost runs as a DOS application for restoring the image. For example, when I wanted to expand my C: drive from a 10 GB partition to the full capacity of a 36-GB drive, I saved an image of the C: drive to a secondary drive (the image is compressed), repartitioned the C: drive, and then loaded the image back on that drive (now 33.9 GB formatted) using Ghost, and Windows never saw the difference, except the drive is now much larger.  ;D  Since Ghost installs a service that by default runs automatically and I've used it just that one time, I've disable the service until the next time I need it.

Keep in mind that even if you preserve applications on a second drive or partition, you will still need to reinstall them thanks to Windows's ill-advised registry architecture, which may have seemed an elegant engineering solution but in practice is a real nightmare. (Interestingly, awhile back a popular US computer magazine listed having applications be self-contained as something Microsoft should borrow from other OSes, such as Linux; they seem to have forgotten that Windows 3.x worked just that way, and if you reinstalled it, it would search for and reinstall any apps you had on your PC.)

This seems amazingly complicated!  Oh, how I wish sometimes for Windows ME back again!  I could reformat that from within the System Restore menu!

I know I should back my stuff up, but I only have a CD drive on this PC, it means really transfering everthing over to my second pc thrugh my network, and then copying it to DVD!  Unfortunately, when Tim, who built and upgraded everything for me did the upgrade/rebuild, he put the old CD drive into this PC and the new DVD/CD drive into the other one!  And it would take forever to copy everything to CDs.

As I said, I hope I don't have to do a complete reinstall, so I'm just doing my level best to keep free of the sort of things that could mea I have to! 

Oh, and I did know about the problem of having to reinstall programs after a reformat/reinstall, as that happened before.

Thanks for the helpful tips, though.

Or you could just back up to the second PC. . . .

 :)

Actually, the second PC would be better as the first, if it had a second HD, as it has Windows XP Pro on it instead of Windows XP Home, and if I could get down and do all the moving around of bits that would be needed, I could move my 2nd HD over, but then I'd no doubt find that I'd need a new CPU or a new power unit or something, so I'm probably better leaving things as they are!  But I will spend a day just backing everything up to either CD or DVD - just have to decide which!