Dangerousdave26
October 6th, 2009, 14:32
OK long story so sit down have a coffee or aldult beverage it you want.
Way back in Feb of this year I bought and installed FSX with Acceleration (the Gold edition).
By March with all the addons and other programs on the PC I had just about filled the 250 GB Hard drive. Yes I should have seen that coming before I installed FSX but I wanted to try it. You know the old story no Patients.
So I get a bug in my *** and blow the whole drive out and install W7 Beta.
Nice clean install all good. Yep I deleted some things I would have rather kept but all water under the bridge.
Well when I had the Beta install in I knew it would end and I would have to reinstall XP soon. Then RC comes out so I blow it all out again and install RC.
Note that I installed FSX on the Beta just to see how it worked but I never activated it.
So now I don't want to be in the same situation again so I figured I would purchase a second drive install FS9 and FSX on that drive and all would be good. I had my heart set on a Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB drive.
However when I finally got the cash to purchase it the store only had the Green Model. So being in a good mood I just bought the WD Green 1 TB drive and off home I go.
From the start I should have know it would go bad. W7 could not initialize the drive. The BIOS was recognizing it but W7 said no way jose I/O Error.
My first thought was this was a BIOS error because my BIOS may not be written for large drives so I updated the BIOS.
NO Help.
Then I figured it was time to Fool the system into thinking it was two smaller drives. That worked on a Laptop that I added a 320 GB drive to just last month. So I used Parted Magic to partition the drive and format it NTFS.
That did it Windows booted with one large drive partitioned into two drives.
The next day I start in and load up FSX on the G:\ partition. Now this is Key I activated both FSX and Acceleration. I set up my controllers ran a few flights and then called it a day.
The next day start the PC and everything is normal. Through out the day I did a couple of quick flights in FSX to test my settings and all was well.
The next day nothing :censored: works. OK thats a little strong what happened is Windows failed to load so it automatically rebooted which I found strange. After the reboot it came up ok but later when I tried to run FSX the system froze up and i had to do the hard shut down. After that the system was basically a no go. I tried booting many times but if it did start it did not recognize that the F:\ and G:\ drives were the same drive volumes I had set them to. When I tried to access files on them it crashed.
This went on until I was frustrated and I disconnected the drive and said forget it. Once it was disconnected the PC worked fine just as it has for years.
Now its Tuesday so I have time to look at it. The PC runs fine when that drive is not installed so I know there is a problem with the drive. I still thought it could be my BIOS so I placed the drive back into SATA 1 position and fired up Parted Magic (boot from CD).
It does not see the drive at all.
So I move the drive to SATA 0 and completely disconnect the other drive.
Nope no luck still the drive is not found by the Linux OS. I tried the cable on my other known good drive and all is good.
This drive is Toast. :pop4:
So I take it back to the store I get a refund no questions asked. Then off I go to Best Buy and I purchased the Black Model WD1001FALS.
I just installed it and wouldn't you know it No problems it works right out of the box.
W7 initialized the drive and formatted it with no problems.
Ok so here is my questions.
FSX was installed to my G:\ which I no longer have because I just formatted this drive into one partition.
I would like to avoid activating FSX again because that will be my third time and W7 will shut off in March so I will need an activation for then.
Is the activation stored on that drive I no longer have or is it an entry in the registry?
How should I go about this should I try uninstalling FSX then install it again.
Lastly should I partition the drive again to put FSX on its own drive?
Yup its a mess but not much I can do other than scold myself for not sticking with my plan in the first place.
Way back in Feb of this year I bought and installed FSX with Acceleration (the Gold edition).
By March with all the addons and other programs on the PC I had just about filled the 250 GB Hard drive. Yes I should have seen that coming before I installed FSX but I wanted to try it. You know the old story no Patients.
So I get a bug in my *** and blow the whole drive out and install W7 Beta.
Nice clean install all good. Yep I deleted some things I would have rather kept but all water under the bridge.
Well when I had the Beta install in I knew it would end and I would have to reinstall XP soon. Then RC comes out so I blow it all out again and install RC.
Note that I installed FSX on the Beta just to see how it worked but I never activated it.
So now I don't want to be in the same situation again so I figured I would purchase a second drive install FS9 and FSX on that drive and all would be good. I had my heart set on a Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB drive.
However when I finally got the cash to purchase it the store only had the Green Model. So being in a good mood I just bought the WD Green 1 TB drive and off home I go.
From the start I should have know it would go bad. W7 could not initialize the drive. The BIOS was recognizing it but W7 said no way jose I/O Error.
My first thought was this was a BIOS error because my BIOS may not be written for large drives so I updated the BIOS.
NO Help.
Then I figured it was time to Fool the system into thinking it was two smaller drives. That worked on a Laptop that I added a 320 GB drive to just last month. So I used Parted Magic to partition the drive and format it NTFS.
That did it Windows booted with one large drive partitioned into two drives.
The next day I start in and load up FSX on the G:\ partition. Now this is Key I activated both FSX and Acceleration. I set up my controllers ran a few flights and then called it a day.
The next day start the PC and everything is normal. Through out the day I did a couple of quick flights in FSX to test my settings and all was well.
The next day nothing :censored: works. OK thats a little strong what happened is Windows failed to load so it automatically rebooted which I found strange. After the reboot it came up ok but later when I tried to run FSX the system froze up and i had to do the hard shut down. After that the system was basically a no go. I tried booting many times but if it did start it did not recognize that the F:\ and G:\ drives were the same drive volumes I had set them to. When I tried to access files on them it crashed.
This went on until I was frustrated and I disconnected the drive and said forget it. Once it was disconnected the PC worked fine just as it has for years.
Now its Tuesday so I have time to look at it. The PC runs fine when that drive is not installed so I know there is a problem with the drive. I still thought it could be my BIOS so I placed the drive back into SATA 1 position and fired up Parted Magic (boot from CD).
It does not see the drive at all.
So I move the drive to SATA 0 and completely disconnect the other drive.
Nope no luck still the drive is not found by the Linux OS. I tried the cable on my other known good drive and all is good.
This drive is Toast. :pop4:
So I take it back to the store I get a refund no questions asked. Then off I go to Best Buy and I purchased the Black Model WD1001FALS.
I just installed it and wouldn't you know it No problems it works right out of the box.
W7 initialized the drive and formatted it with no problems.
Ok so here is my questions.
FSX was installed to my G:\ which I no longer have because I just formatted this drive into one partition.
I would like to avoid activating FSX again because that will be my third time and W7 will shut off in March so I will need an activation for then.
Is the activation stored on that drive I no longer have or is it an entry in the registry?
How should I go about this should I try uninstalling FSX then install it again.
Lastly should I partition the drive again to put FSX on its own drive?
Yup its a mess but not much I can do other than scold myself for not sticking with my plan in the first place.