Reinstalling the media center box, part 1.
As I glossed over on my last post, I've been reinstalling my media center pc. So far I've:
- Formatted C Drive
- Installed Vista
- Installed the motherboard, audio, video, tv card, and bluetooth drivers.
And that's enough for tonight. I'se tired and sleepy. Interestingly, the remote control I got, since it's only a keyboard as far as the PC is concerned, works absolutely everywhere. Even the BIOS setup screen. I'm yet to work out if any key on the remote maps to 'escape' though - till I find that, some things are still a tad hard.
I'm pretty sure that there's something wrong with my hardware though. If I enter the BIOS setup screen with a USB memory stick inserted, the keyboard stops working after about the 3rd keypress. It also randomly and only occasionally gets stuck on the post screen when rebooting, and after about 10 seconds stalled only showing the motherboard model number, it reboots itself again.
The worst symptom however is it's lack of ability to boot off a hard drive. I was hoping a reinstall would fix the problem, but it didn't.
When I first got the TV card, windows wasn't detecting the card. No matter what I did, nothing was found. I added a little 3 gig IDE drive (the normal drive is SATA) and installed XP on it, wondering if it was a Vista issue. XP didn't see it either at first, but after a couple of 'reboot-remove card-reboot-add card' cycles, it suddenly saw it. Take the crappy drive out, do a repair of the boot loader (since XP blew away the Vista loader) and the card was visible in Vista.
But ever since then, it won't boot the hard drive. No matter how many repairs or anything I do, it just fails.
UNLESS I have a bootable cd or dvd in the drive. In that case, it offers to boot the disc (to which you do nothing and let it NOT boot from the disc) and magically it boots off the hard drive. No cd in the drive, and you get nothing.
I really wish that problem had gone away tonight.
Perhaps I have to blow away the entire partition table on the hard drive (it's split into a 50 gig C and a 250 gig D). I hope not, but it's all I can think of.
If anyone can confirm that a complete wipe of the entire drive will fix that problem, let me know before thursday night (Australian time) so I don't waste any more time doing setup :)
So tomorrow night (scratch that - crap it's got late - tonight) I've probably got ten thousand and four updates to apply from windows update, anti-virus to install, tv stations to configure, favourites to restore, uTorrent to install, codecs to add, and maybe, just maybe, media center to setup. We'll see. If it stops bluescreening on divx files, then I'll give it a go for a few days.
Oh, and I've also got to add my 360 as an extender. It's been failing to do that too - another reason for the reinstall. Hopefully it was that the antivirus was getting in the road or something. *crosses fingers*