Experienced Popcorn Hour users' advice needed, please...

[dh2005]

How d'you like this for yet another ironic kick to the groin...?

... these drives were formatted to FAT32 when they were new, and it was formatting them to NTFS that slowed them down. So I decided to reformat one of them back to FAT32, to see whether this drive or the NTFS drive performed better during movie playback so that I could decide which of these two formats to commit to (given that getting Ext3 onto my external drives appears to be the hardest thing in the World).

Guess what? It's impossible to reformat an NTFS drive to FAT32 in Windows Vista and XP.

[sound of DH hanging himself]

... would you believe it?!

So, basically, I had two drives that worked fine, I reformatted them so that they worked less fine, and this step cannot be undone.

[sound of DH's immortal soul weeping for Eternity]

When all this is said and done, I think this thread should become a sticky entitled - "this is what happens when it ALL goes wrong".

[dh2005]

Harpmaker wrote:

Finally, I think you could download almost any "live" Linux distribution CD and use it to format your drives. Vista would have nothing to do with it!

DUDE! Seriously!!! If you know how to do this, please walk me through it...

... on someone else's advice I downloaded an .ISO of an Ubuntu Live CD (whatever that is...!) - some 689MB file that, apparently, will answer my prayers. But moo baby moo do I do with it?!?! (translation: "what do I do with this .ISO?")

Please, become my favourite person on Earth and give me a moron's guide.

[... still weeping...]


EDIT: Personally, I don't consider what I wrote to be swearing... but I'm leaving "moo baby moo" there because it looks funny!

EDIT EDIT: By the way - even if I were to've sworn, I think even the most Christian of web-nanny software would forgive me... I don't think I've ever been so frustrated in all my life.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: Anyone who helps me to resolve this formatting issue will have a favour to call in, anywhere, anytime...!

[dh2005]

Alternative title for this thread when it's a sticky - "Have you ever seen a grown man cry...?"

I welcome other suggestions.

[Harpmaker]

Hang in there DH! Step away from the edge of the roof and relax, I'm downloading and testing a live sysadmin CD. Will report back soon. There is still hope!

[Harpmaker]

OK, unless your hardware simply hates Linux, I think I have a solution for you.

1. Download the file 'gparted-live-0.3.9-13.iso' located here. It's 94.9MB. Don't get the zip file.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...kage_id=271779

2. Burn the .ISO file to a CD. Most programs like Nero or CD Creator can do this, but I use a free program called ImgBurn. To clarify, don't simply copy, or write the .ISO file to a CD, this file MUST be USED to create a CD since the .ISO is an image file, not a program file. It's easy as pie with ImgBurn.
http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

3. Make sure your PC will boot from a CD (this may have to be set in the BIOS). Put the Gparted CD in the CD/DVD drive the PC will boot from (in case you have multiple DVD drives ). Restart the PC.

4. After the CD starts, you will need to make a few selections to continue. I chose to go with the default settings at the first screen (just wait for it to time-out). Ignore the stuff that flashes across your screen too fast to read, it means something to Linux, but not to you.

5. The next selection is keymapping. I chose 'Don't touch keymap'.

6. It then prompts you what keymap to use. I chose #33 US English, you should probably go with #02 British English.

7. I chose Mode 0 at the next prompt (just press the Enter key).

The system will now boot into Linux and start Gparted automatically. It took about 1 1/2 minutes for my system to find all the drives I have on it. The longest was my 1TB USB drive.

8. After Gparted starts (the bottom bar will stop moving back and forth), select the drive you want to work with by clicking on the down-pointing arrow, in the top-right of the Gparted window, and selecting it from the list.

9. Put the mouse cursor anywhere inside the green rectangle and left-click the mouse (this selects the drive). Right-click the mouse and move the cursor to 'Format To', this brings up a list of available formats the drive can be formatted to.

At this point, you're on your own, I didn't format any of my drives to test this.

More documentation can be found at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Hope this does the trick for you.

If you need more help I can try to take and post some screen captures.

There are many formats you can choose from (including FAT32). If you feel daring, you might want to try using ReiserFS on a drive and see how it works, this is a "journaling" file system (whatever that is) and is the file system used by many of the Linux versions designed to be media center software. I say daring because I don't know if the A-110 supports this file system.

[dh2005]

Thanks, man. I've not got around to trying this yet, but I will.

Your efforts amaze me. Now I've two reasons to cry...!

[Harpmaker]

In my hurry to get this info to you I forgot to mention what Gparted is.

"GParted is the Gnome Partition Editor application. Before attempting to use it, here is some basic background information.

A hard disk is usually subdivided into one or more partitions. These partitions are normally not re-sizable (making one smaller and the adjacent one larger). The purpose of GParted is to allow the individual to take a hard disk and change the partition organization therein, while preserving the partition contents.

GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging)."

The "live" Gparted CD is a bootable version of Linux (it doesn't install anything to your system hard drive, everything runs from the CD), it's only purpose is to run the Gparted program. After booting your PC with this CD you are running a Linux PC, but you don't have all the overhead, or power, of the full Linux OS.

DH, the Ubuntu .ISO you downloaded can be used in a similar fashion to the Gparted CD, but it is a full Linux implementation. It probably has Gparted on it as well, but a lot of other stuff you don't need is also launched or prepared for use (such as web browsers, CD players, games, etc.). That is why I suggested downloading the Gparted .ISO.

[dh2005]

Hey, man.

Listen, your commitment to my problem has been legendary. I'm touched, genuinely.

For now, I'm gonna bumble on with NTFS. It seems to be working fine for playback so far... but if it starts to freak out, I'll get into Linux filing systems ASAP.

Thanks again. And Happy New Year!

[Harpmaker]

dh2005 wrote:

Hey, man.

Listen, your commitment to my problem has been legendary. I'm touched, genuinely.

For now, I'm gonna bumble on with NTFS. It seems to be working fine for playback so far... but if it starts to freak out, I'll get into Linux filing systems ASAP.

Thanks again. And Happy New Year!

No worries, DH. Glad to be of help.

With the craziness that is Windows these days, I think I will partition and format my drives in the future using Gparted anyway! It will do Windows and Mac formats as well as Linux.

[dh2005]

You're a gentleman and a Saint, sir.

My A-110, after two weeks of relentless faffing, appears finally to be working. And when these babies work, they're truly beautiful.