Once again resurrected my PC from certain doom, this time a dying hard drive that was visited by the bad-sector gremlins, which ate 6GB of data, including numerous user settings for programs. And all it took was a whole fucking day spent waiting for stuff to finish, with added facepalming due to not backing things up before hand.
Remember people - Always Back Shit Up when it appears your hard drive is about to go to the scrap heap in the sky.
Ended up loosing my firefox stuff and what was left ended up screwing up firefox ESR 52 somewhat so had to completely reinstall firefox. Though I think the most important thing, namely my Grim Dawn saves, is safe though. And it appears cloning over to a newer hard drive also solved the BSoD I was getting that was suggesting I was going to have to buy a replacement GPU as well.
Very tempted though to snag the 2nd RX 470 for NZ$200 via afterpay, but my budgeting senses are going “nope nope nope”. Despite getting it means I will be able to play Phoenix Point and other games that don’t play nicely with my ancient HD6850.
Also got an offer from an old high school mate to send me their retired gaming PC, but we’ll see. Will go for it though if it’s able to use DDR3, since DDR2 is limited to 8GB max, and the (apparent) PCI hole on my current system means only about 4.5GB is available for games when you take into account OS needs. But otherwise, next year, it’s finally upgrade time. Via ex-lease business PC or whatever else works to a mid range, 16GB RAM set up with whatever mid or lower-mid range GPU I can find. And then I’ll finally be able to play Deus Ex: MD and DOOM without issues.
Oh and due to being tired I forgot how to set advanced settings in clonezilla. So guess who had to restart 5 times until they worked out hitting the space key enabled the options? Primarily so it wouldn’t choke on bad sectors.
Simply age, the 500GB’s pretty old, I think maybe 6-8 years I’ve had it and it’s been through 3 major earthquakes on top. So over that time stuff’s gone slightly wrong, a stray bit of radiation has affected the drive platter or one of the quake’s caused the read/write head to brush the platter.
And for my next act of franken-PC stuff I’m sticking an RX 570 4GB into this ancient socket 775 rig. In theory it should work given PCIe is meant to be backwards compatible, but it will be bottlenecked by the PCIe 2.0 interface and the older hardware. Probably by about 40% I’d guess, but then again it’s only driving a 1400x1050 resolution screen, so likely wont be that noticeable.
One advantage though is I’ll have a new GPU with a 3yr extended warranty that will slot very nicely into next year’s upgrade and I can also then later on focus on getting one of the new AMD Navi mid range cards when they come out.
And I’ve finally given in to getting a new case too, since I just don’t have the fluffing energy to sort out the issues with my Corsair 600T. As it’s missing a hard drive cage + 1 tray and needs the top mesh catch fixed. Which this extended 5yr long depressive episode is completely fluffing with vis getting this shit done.
So I’m going to get a Phanteks Enthoo Pro Black after I pay off the RX 570 for about ~NZ$190 and then get dust filters for every fluffing bit. Would love it if it came in white, since my 600T converted me to the church of white (and black elements) as a good PC case colour, but the phantek’s not available in white. Otherwise though, cases, particularly full tower cases, are bloody expensive in NZ, usually NZ$300+ due to the cost of shipping them here. So getting one for under $200 with free shipping isn’t just good, it’s fluffing great for what is a pretty damn good case.
Ideally I’d get Fractal Define R6 Tempered Glass White case, except I can’t make it work money wise at present, and frankly I’d rather not be limited to only one 5.25 bay. Though you can stuff it with 8+ hard drives if you buy more HHD trays and probably stuff in some more in the base under the PSU shroud. Tempted just to get one for a file server, but will probably just get a 2nd hand case instead with 5.25 bays all in the front and stuff it with hotswap bays.
Ugg, also I’m tempted to buy Phanteks Enthoo Mini XL Black, because I’m itching to do a mini-ATX build, but it wont be for me, as I has plaaaaaans. Since there’s so going to be some cheap AMD 2nd hand CPU’s and GPU’s in a couple of years which I could make use of to gift a family I know with a decent gaming PC.
My HDD is 10 years old and has been running for nearly 24,000 hours. Then again we have no major earthquakes here. But trucks passing our house on the federal road are shaking the building a few times the day.
True - HHD life span has a looooong (thin) tail, heck there’s still 20+ year old HHD’s still working and in another 20yrs some 2TB+ drives will still work. But statistically most are going to die or fail before 10yrs. Not that 3 major shakes and 1 PSU shorting out helped in my case… Fortunately Western Digital HHD’s tend to last, especially their Black ones, though I seem to have escaped the curse vis my 2TB Seagate HHD.
And the 500GB is most definitely failing as if I leave it connect to the computer windows explorer starts chewing up CPU resources. Fuck knows why though, but it’s definitely not a good sign. So the drive will remain offline and stored for the meanwhile.
Still haven’t placed the replacement drive into it’s place in the cage either, because I keep forgetting to do it So it’s currently sitting on top of a roll of duct tape.
It wooooorks! Even though the motherboard and CPU are nearly 10 years old :3
Well, I haven’t fully tested it, but otherwise the RX 570 I just installed is working display wise and after the reboot we shall see just how well things run. Also, it’s surprisingly quiet at the moment, which tells me the fans in my HD 6850 1GB were probably getting closed to their end of life.
Right then - let this driver install go nicely and then I can do some testing vis DOOM (once it downloads) and some other stuff.
An aside though - kicking myself recently for selling off the AMD Phenom X6 I got, should have just brought an AM3 motherboard and I would have been pretty sweet. More so since I wouldn’t have been limited to 8GB of DDR2. So memo to self - don’t listen to Intel Fanboi’s on reddit, they aren’t equipped to critically think about a user’s situation and needs in the longterm. Because they magically think everyone can afford to upgrade constantly.
So it’s currently sitting on top of a roll of duct tape.