Lessons In Hardware / OS Troubleshooting 236
Esther Schindler writes "We like to imagine that every Microsoft OS installation will work just as well as the company promises. When things don't work out, identifying and remedying the case of failure can be time-consuming and frustrating. This lesson in how to determine why Windows 7 didn't install may help you troubleshoot a problem of your own, and save you from a Lost Weekend. Maybe you'll find this account useful all on its own. But the real key here is that the author is Ed Tittel — who's written over 100 books. If this hardware geek spends days solving a CPU-meets-Windows 7 problem, what chance do mere mortals have?"
You're Kidding (Score:5, Informative)
This is front-page news for Slashdot now? Here's the sum total of TFA:
Wow, color me impressed!
How are "mortals" supposed to figure it out? I guess they buy a PC from Dell because everything in that article qualifies as "no duh" for system builders.
Re:You're Kidding (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What I love here is the part where he (Score:4, Informative)
And what specific parameter in any Linux installation error message is likely to point towards the CPU being defective? Most of them would be generic hardware-has-shit-itself errors (DMA failures, null pointer exceptions, hash failures) that could mean any of the cpu/motherboard/ram/psu/hdd are defective.
That would be the P.O.S.T. [wikipedia.org] which your BIOS should be checking.
Re:You're Kidding (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sooooo (Score:4, Informative)
I also found it bizarre that at no point did he seem to think of checking the setup logs [microsoft.com]. Admittedly, it probably wouldn't have helped him in this case, as logs often don't reveal anything in the case of intermittent hardware failure, but really, if I have a problem with setup, the first thing I'd think to check would be the log files in case they turn up something interesting. That's, you know, kind of why they're there...
Re:In all fairness (Score:1, Informative)
Re:actually (Score:5, Informative)
Do what I do--run Windows, put Linux in a VM. Virtual Box is free, robust, and easy to use, or there's always VMWare.
Run the VM full screen and you can forget you're not running it natively, so long as you don't need to do anything in 3D or very processor intensive (video encoding, for example). Drop to Windows if you need a Windows app (say, a recent version of Photoshop or real MSOffice) or to play games. Plus, if your chosen distro decides to make horrible decisions that cause massive audio breakage (Ubuntu.... *glower*) you can still listen to music or watch Youtube videos in Windows without rebooting.
Another plus is that your Linux installation is all in a single file that you can back up or transfer very easily.
I find that this works far better than dual booting. Saves disk space, saves time. I felt kind of crappy at first for making Linux a second-class citizen on my machine, but this works so much better that I wish I'd done it years ago--though I supposed high clocked multi-core processors and multi-gigabyte RAM sticks weren't commonplace back then, so the experience might not have been so nice.
Re:actually (Score:2, Informative)
If I had mod points.. i would devote them all to you..
I do exactly what you do in ALL my workstations.. from my 8 year old 1.7Ghz single Core Pentium-M with only 2GB Ram (Run windows 732bit Host) and use VMWare Workstation 7 to run latest ubuntu in full screen... its fast.. all the way to my latest 64bit Core-i7 HyperThreaded runing 64bit Windows-7 with 8GB Ram.. with 4GB devoted to my 32bit paravirtualized kernel of Ubuntu 9.10 for development in full screen on a tripple monitor system!
Can't beat it for flexibility and maximum choice of tools for everything.
Its really too bad that Apple never lets OS-X run in VM on non apple hardware.. then I would be in heaven!
Re:Sooooo (Score:2, Informative)
Not true. We also blame SCO, the MAFIAA and, lately, Apple.
Re:You're Kidding (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, he has installed 30-plus intel based Windows Seven machines? Since its launch, I have had about 40-50 DOA intel processors, NONE of which were engineering samples.
Guy is what we, in Australia, would call a "Tosser" who for lack of a better description is "Talking wank".
No, mere mortals would never be required to sort out this problem, because they would never encounter it.
Order for troubleshooting random seeming install fails is:
Install media (the disk, get a known good image/disk)
Hardware that reads that media (DVD drive, cable)
Ram
CPU
HDD (and cable)
Board
PSU
Most DOA PSU problems are dead PSU, most of the rest are rating selection errors (not powerful enough).
Also, this list is optimised not only for most likely faults but for parts that are "easy" to replace :)
Re:Sooooo (Score:3, Informative)
*typically* the a non-overheating CPU tends to work to spec (or similar to other models in the line), or not at all, without much inbetween behavior. I can see why he would replace it last, if it were a normal CPU. That being said, as the article stated, he's not using a normal CPU.
With particularly quirky errors, I would go for Memory, Motherboard and PSU as the most likely cause (add disk in this case as it is during file writes - however the disk worked fine with the previous OS, so that mitigates a lot of concern with the disk).
So, were he not using a nonstandard CPU, I would have agreed with his methodology (except replaced the PSU in an earlier step).
With the nonstandard CPU, I'd have replaced that first. There's no baseline for comparison.