My Sims Machine Died (and what I did about it) - Page 3

Greg · 02-12-2008, 02:19 AM

It might work to mount the drives in an external empty hard drive case with a USB interface.

I've been looking around and I think I finally found a source for such a thing:
http://www.epinions.com/t-external-drive-case

Greg · 02-12-2008, 02:26 AM

Here's an external IDE hard drive enclosure from Tiger Direct for only $30.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...604&CatId=2779

Users gave it a 5-star rating, which is a heck of a lot better than the hatchet job they did on the reviews of a similar product from Coolmax.

Greg · 02-12-2008, 02:37 AM

Rats. I tried restarting again and this time it was trying to boot from the old data disk. So now both of the IDE drives are out of the system. It looks like I'll have to try some other way to recover the data. That external drive case with a USB interface just might be the trick because I can plug in the drive with Windows already running.

I'm sure I should be doing something to configure the BIOS to tell it to always boot from the SATA drive, but I haven't figured out that part yet.

mikedelaney16 · 02-12-2008, 02:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greg

I removed the system disk from the old hp machine and restarted, and now Windows Vista is coming right up!

Yup, the old system disk also has at least one partition set as the active/boot partition. So you had a conflict. The only way I know to reset a partition from "active" to "inactive" (why can't they say boot and non- boot) is with Windows fdisk, best run from a boot floppy or CD. Be careful not to delete the partition.

There is also the possibility that the system BIOS wants to boot from the old drive once it sees it, make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the SATA drive. But you still need to resolve that conflict.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greg

I think my challenge is to figure out how to tell the machine that I want the old hp system disk to be mounted as a slave drive.

Given that the new system disk is SATA and the two old ones are IDE (correct me if I'm wrong), then one of the IDE drives needs the jumpers set to master and the other to slave. and they need to be connected to the correct connectors on the cable. I'm not sure if the settings have anything to do with the presence of both drives, just which connector they use. Miros can correct me, but I think the end connector is master and the one near the end is the slave.

Ignore anything the device manager tells you until you have exhausted all hardware possibilities. Do not "Populate" (is that a new word for format?) either of the old drives.

Are both the old drives formatted as NTFS? If not that could be an issue, I'm not sure if Vista supports Fat32.

Greg · 02-12-2008, 02:46 AM

Yes, both the old drives say "ATA" on them, and all the notes I can find say that that's the same as "IDE." The article on Wikipedia even has a gripe that there are too many synonyms for "ATA."

It might be that the system automatically prefers to load from the IDE drives, but I think that hot-pluggable external disk enclosure will solve that one.

Greg · 02-12-2008, 03:08 AM

Here's a bit of silliness: After I removed the old drives from the box and buttoned everything up, the machine would not boot up. No response at all from the power-on switch. EEEK!

When I opened the case again, I saw that in the process of pulling out the cables to the old drives, I had dislodged the connector that goes to the front panel switches.

Now Windows Vista is booting up again, but unfortunately I still don't have access to my old data, dang it.

Greg · 02-12-2008, 04:10 AM

I went ahead and ordered that toy from Tiger Direct. It'll take a few days to get here but at least now I feel as if I'm making some progress!

If that doesn't work I'll be looking for a professional who knows how to make this thing work.

Lesson learned: Back up to removable media. I figured I was totally safe backing up to a spare hard drive but it turns out that getting a Windows machine to read the extra hard drive is more of an adventure than I had imagined!

Miros1 · 02-12-2008, 10:42 AM

The Maxtor jumper settings are at the Seagate site. I gave Sandy the addy in the thread about her 'puter troubles... Lemme find it...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Miros1

Here's the link for Maxtor/Seagate Troubleshooting: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/i...rt/DM20&21.jpg tells you how to set your drive to "Auto-select" by moving the jumper block on the back. Most drives are set that way (I think the manufacturer recommends it), but if you assume that, you know your drive won't be. Once the jumper is in the correct position, you just plug the middle plug on the ribbon cable into the back of your drive. Then you plug the end plug that was plugged into your old drive into the new drive and run the CD that came with your new drive to do the formatting and partitioning.

With large drives, always use the U-100 cable (has 3 different color plugs), not the plain ribbon cable with all 3 plugs the same color. This cable will come with your new drive.

Maxtor also sells an ATA(?) card that will let you plug 4 physical drives into it.

I think the jumper settings just determine which connector you plug in, just like Mike said.

Greg · 02-12-2008, 12:16 PM

Thanks, Rose. I'd better look into the jumper question when I tried the external drive trick.

But now, while installing Nightlife...

"Failed to find and DirectX9.0c compatible graphics adapters in this system! Please make sure you have a DirectX9.0c compatible graphics adapter and have installed the latest drivers provided by the manufacturer. The application will now terminate."

Added: If anyone with the same problem finds this message and is wondering what to do, see my next note below.

Added: The VisionTek site insists that the VisionTek Radeon 3850 graphics card is DirectX 10 compatible.

Greg · 02-12-2008, 12:34 PM

Now, despite that terrifying message, The Sims 2 Nightlife starts up with no apparent glitches!

That's bad; terribly bad. A user would logically become terribly discouraged by that erroneous error message and go off looking for a compatible card instead of doing what I did, which was to just see if the game would run.

Miros1 · 02-12-2008, 04:42 PM

That's because the silly programmers put in the statement "if DirectXVersion != 9.0c" instead of "if DirectXVersion < 9.0c"

Moral for programmers: never assume the current state of the art is the highest it will ever be.

BTW, if you can figure out which drive doesn't have the operating system on it, you should be able to attempt the data recovery on it, since it's already set to automatic or slave...

Greg · 02-12-2008, 04:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Miros1

BTW, if you can figure out which drive doesn't have the operating system on it, you should be able to attempt the data recovery on it, since it's already set to automatic or slave...

I thought so, too, but when I tried to start up with the data drive in the machine and the old system drive removed, it wouldn't get past that disk. I don't understand this at all. Maybe it has something to do with how the BIOS is configured.

I'm betting on the external drive trick but I won't be able to test that until the enclosure gets here. I'm feeling pretty confident about that because I can plug it in while the system is already running. I should be well past any boot issues then.

TomP · 02-12-2008, 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greg

I thought so, too, but when I tried to start up with the data drive in the machine and the old system drive removed, it wouldn't get past that disk. I don't understand this at all. Maybe it has something to do with how the BIOS is configured.

I'm betting on the external drive trick but I won't be able to test that until the enclosure gets here. I'm feeling pretty confident about that because I can plug it in while the system is already running. I should be well past any boot issues then.

External will definitely work around the problem your having Greg. In the BIOS you might be able to tell it to look at the SATA drive first in the boot order, so it will not try to boot your IDE. They always seem to prioritize IDE over SATA, don't understand why.

Miros1 · 02-12-2008, 07:44 PM

Actually, if it still wants the Windows CD on boot, I suspect the order is CD, IDE, SATA or IDE, CD, SATA

Miros1 · 02-12-2008, 08:52 PM

Greg, call Maxtor/Seagate tech support ASAP! Your Maxtor drive was manufactured 5 years and 5 days ago, it might be under warrenty!

They also have utilities that should be able to make your bootable partitions non-bootable.

Worth a call either way...

Hokieman · 02-13-2008, 12:58 AM

Greg, I went thru the same thing last year. My problems started differently but eventually ran into the same problems you are having. Mine turned out to be that the bios kept ignoring the SATA drive during boot up and kept going to the IDE even though I told it to boot from the SATA in the bios setup (the system wouldn't see the SATA. Turns out that for the particular motherboard I bought, the drives have to be the same type i.e. either all IDE or all SATA. It didn't say this on the box, in any of the docs or in the online info but I finally found a guy at the motherboard manufacturer tech support who told me that-it was done by design. The IDE was there to run the CD or DVD drives. That could be your problem but you have a different motherboard (& manufacturer) so it might not too. BTW, I didn't change my OS - stayed with XP.

So to finally recover the data, I ended up putting my drives in the wifey's computer (since she still had IDE and no problem with it trying to boot from my drive instead of hers) one at the time and burning everything to CD and transferring it to my machine by many many CDs, reinstalling from there. Took awhile but it worked and I was able to salvage most the stuff I needed off the old drives. Getting Sims2 running again is another story - you really don't want to know on that one. I didn't even think of the USB/external drive solution and hope it works for you. I miss Anja already.

BTW, I've really enjoyed your writing. You got me hooked big time with Anja. I just finished up with Happy Valley and Bonnyview Shores last week so I think I've finally caught up on the Happy Valley world. Thanks for sharing it with us all.

Greg · 02-13-2008, 01:56 AM

Thank you for the kind words, Hokieman, and for the experience report, too! It's good to know that I'm not the only one!

At least I have managed to find all the important software installation disks while I'm waiting for that empty external disk case to arrive. I have The Sims 2 installed up through Nightlife along with Sim City 4 and Microsoft Office 2003.

I'm hoping against hope that I can recover data from those disks. Besides all my Sims stuff, those disks have everything I need--all my license codes for downloaded software and even a collection of passwords for this and that. Then there are all the CAD models and Ghu knows what else.

Fortunately I have my email on my own domains so I was able to sign on to the server and change the passwords on all my email accounts. The only problem is that most of those license codes are stored away in Outlook email messages. I don't know that will be recoverable because getting into Outlook mail folders is mysterious.

I've been thinking about that removable external drive as a backup device, and the more I think about it, the more I like it. For less than $200 you can have umptygoodgollygigabytes of storage on a USB device, totally portable, able to be squirreled away in a safe place, impervious to system disasters, and able to be plugged into almost any computer--Mac, PC, or Unix--that you happen to be using at the moment.

Greg · 02-13-2008, 02:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomP

External will definitely work around the problem your having Greg. In the BIOS you might be able to tell it to look at the SATA drive first in the boot order, so it will not try to boot your IDE. They always seem to prioritize IDE over SATA, don't understand why.

Thanks, Tom!

From reading the documentation that came with the ASUS motherboard, I get the impression that they expect up to 4 SATA drives to be configured in a RAID array.

This machine has 8 drive bays so I don't think it's a problem of mixing types of drives, but rather as you suggested, it wants to give priority to the IDE string.

I have an easy-to-use BIOS update utility that came with the machine but it doesn't seem to be happy with Windows Vista. I fear that means I'll have to resort to the you-have-to-learn-something BIOS updating method. Darn it.

Hokieman · 02-13-2008, 02:50 AM

Greg, recovering the Outlook email isn't hard at all once you can get into the drive. Vista may be a little different than XP but it should be close enough to not matter.

Look in the folder setup under the tools dropdown and check the box in Folder Options View tab to show hidden files.

Then go to to your documents & settings/your user name/local settings/application data/microsoft/outlook directory and look for a file with a pst suffix (the default is outlook.pst). If you were already using personal folders, find the pst files whereever you stashed them and move those as well.

Create a new directory on the hard drive( I call mine Email-Yeah, I know thats really original) and copy the pst file there. You could just overwrite the one on the new drive in the outlook save directory if you want but I wouldn't advise that just in case something goes wrong. Not likely but it could.

Then go into outlook on the new machine and create a personal folder and point it to the pst file(s). Just follow the directions in the email account setup to set up the personal folder (name it whatever you like). Everything should show up and you can move emails between the email save folders as you like.

I do it every once in a while so that the wifes email is on her computer and mine is on mine (we share 1 email account and whoever gets there first downloads it all).

When you're done, just go back and make the hidden files hidden again if you want to but you don't have to.

Greg · 02-13-2008, 12:10 PM

Thanks, Hokieman! As soon as I can read those disks, I'll try that!

02-12-2008, 02:19 AM	#41
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	It might work to mount the drives in an external empty hard drive case with a USB interface. I've been looking around and I think I finally found a source for such a thing: http://www.epinions.com/t-external-drive-case __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

02-12-2008, 02:26 AM	#42
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Here's an external IDE hard drive enclosure from Tiger Direct for only $30. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...604&CatId=2779 Users gave it a 5-star rating, which is a heck of a lot better than the hatchet job they did on the reviews of a similar product from Coolmax. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

02-12-2008, 02:37 AM	#43
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Rats. I tried restarting again and this time it was trying to boot from the old data disk. So now both of the IDE drives are out of the system. It looks like I'll have to try some other way to recover the data. That external drive case with a USB interface just might be the trick because I can plug in the drive with Windows already running. I'm sure I should be doing something to configure the BIOS to tell it to always boot from the SATA drive, but I haven't figured out that part yet. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

02-12-2008, 02:46 AM	#45
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Yes, both the old drives say "ATA" on them, and all the notes I can find say that that's the same as "IDE." The article on Wikipedia even has a gripe that there are too many synonyms for "ATA." It might be that the system automatically prefers to load from the IDE drives, but I think that hot-pluggable external disk enclosure will solve that one. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know? Last edited by Greg : 04-16-2008 at 12:26 AM.

02-12-2008, 03:08 AM	#46
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Here's a bit of silliness: After I removed the old drives from the box and buttoned everything up, the machine would not boot up. No response at all from the power-on switch. EEEK! When I opened the case again, I saw that in the process of pulling out the cables to the old drives, I had dislodged the connector that goes to the front panel switches. Now Windows Vista is booting up again, but unfortunately I still don't have access to my old data, dang it. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

02-12-2008, 04:10 AM	#47
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	I went ahead and ordered that toy from Tiger Direct. It'll take a few days to get here but at least now I feel as if I'm making some progress! If that doesn't work I'll be looking for a professional who knows how to make this thing work. Lesson learned: Back up to *removable* media. I figured I was totally safe backing up to a spare hard drive but it turns out that getting a Windows machine to read the extra hard drive is more of an adventure than I had imagined! __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

02-12-2008, 12:16 PM	#49
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Thanks, Rose. I'd better look into the jumper question when I tried the external drive trick. But now, while installing *Nightlife... "Failed to find and DirectX9.0c compatible graphics adapters in this system! Please make sure you have a DirectX9.0c compatible graphics adapter and have installed the latest drivers provided by the manufacturer. The application will now terminate." Added:* If anyone with the same problem finds this message and is wondering what to do, see my next note below. Added: The VisionTek site insists that the VisionTek Radeon 3850 graphics card is DirectX 10 compatible. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know? Last edited by Greg : 02-12-2008 at 12:36 PM.

02-12-2008, 12:34 PM	#50
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Now, despite that terrifying message, The Sims 2 Nightlife starts up with no apparent glitches! That's bad; terribly bad. A user would logically become terribly discouraged by that erroneous error message and go off looking for a compatible card instead of doing what I did, which was to just see if the game would run. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

02-12-2008, 04:42 PM	#51
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	That's because the silly programmers put in the statement "if DirectXVersion != 9.0c" instead of "if DirectXVersion < 9.0c" Moral for programmers: never assume the current state of the art is the highest it will ever be. BTW, if you can figure out which drive doesn't have the operating system on it, you should be able to attempt the data recovery on it, since it's already set to automatic or slave...

02-12-2008, 07:44 PM	#54
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	Actually, if it still wants the Windows CD on boot, I suspect the order is CD, IDE, SATA or IDE, CD, SATA

02-12-2008, 08:52 PM	#55
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	Greg, call Maxtor/Seagate tech support ASAP! Your Maxtor drive was manufactured 5 years and 5 days ago, it might be under warrenty! They also have utilities that should be able to make your bootable partitions non-bootable. Worth a call either way... Last edited by Miros1 : 02-12-2008 at 08:58 PM.

02-13-2008, 12:58 AM	#56
Hokieman Solar Max Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Las Vegas Posts: 520	Greg, I went thru the same thing last year. My problems started differently but eventually ran into the same problems you are having. Mine turned out to be that the bios kept ignoring the SATA drive during boot up and kept going to the IDE even though I told it to boot from the SATA in the bios setup (the system wouldn't see the SATA. Turns out that for the particular motherboard I bought, the drives have to be the same type i.e. either all IDE or all SATA. It didn't say this on the box, in any of the docs or in the online info but I finally found a guy at the motherboard manufacturer tech support who told me that-it was done by design. The IDE was there to run the CD or DVD drives. That could be your problem but you have a different motherboard (& manufacturer) so it might not too. BTW, I didn't change my OS - stayed with XP. So to finally recover the data, I ended up putting my drives in the wifey's computer (since she still had IDE and no problem with it trying to boot from my drive instead of hers) one at the time and burning everything to CD and transferring it to my machine by many many CDs, reinstalling from there. Took awhile but it worked and I was able to salvage most the stuff I needed off the old drives. Getting Sims2 running again is another story - you really don't want to know on that one. I didn't even think of the USB/external drive solution and hope it works for you. I miss Anja already. BTW, I've really enjoyed your writing. You got me hooked big time with Anja. I just finished up with Happy Valley and Bonnyview Shores last week so I think I've finally caught up on the Happy Valley world. Thanks for sharing it with us all.

02-13-2008, 01:56 AM	#57
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Thank you for the kind words, Hokieman, and for the experience report, too! It's good to know that I'm not the only one! At least I have managed to find all the important software installation disks while I'm waiting for that empty external disk case to arrive. I have The Sims 2 installed up through Nightlife along with Sim City 4 and Microsoft Office 2003. I'm hoping against hope that I can recover data from those disks. Besides all my Sims stuff, those disks have everything I need--all my license codes for downloaded software and even a collection of passwords for this and that. Then there are all the CAD models and Ghu knows what else. Fortunately I have my email on my own domains so I was able to sign on to the server and change the passwords on all my email accounts. The only problem is that most of those license codes are stored away in Outlook email messages. I don't know that will be recoverable because getting into Outlook mail folders is mysterious. I've been thinking about that removable external drive as a backup device, and the more I think about it, the more I like it. For less than $200 you can have umptygoodgollygigabytes of storage on a USB device, totally portable, able to be squirreled away in a safe place, impervious to system disasters, and able to be plugged into almost any computer--Mac, PC, or Unix--that you happen to be using at the moment. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

02-13-2008, 02:50 AM	#59
Hokieman Solar Max Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Las Vegas Posts: 520	Greg, recovering the Outlook email isn't hard at all once you can get into the drive. Vista may be a little different than XP but it should be close enough to not matter. Look in the folder setup under the tools dropdown and check the box in Folder Options View tab to show hidden files. Then go to to your documents & settings/your user name/local settings/application data/microsoft/outlook directory and look for a file with a pst suffix (the default is outlook.pst). If you were already using personal folders, find the pst files whereever you stashed them and move those as well. Create a new directory on the hard drive( I call mine Email-Yeah, I know thats really original) and copy the pst file there. You could just overwrite the one on the new drive in the outlook save directory if you want but I wouldn't advise that just in case something goes wrong. Not likely but it could. Then go into outlook on the new machine and create a personal folder and point it to the pst file(s). Just follow the directions in the email account setup to set up the personal folder (name it whatever you like). Everything should show up and you can move emails between the email save folders as you like. I do it every once in a while so that the wifes email is on her computer and mine is on mine (we share 1 email account and whoever gets there first downloads it all). When you're done, just go back and make the hidden files hidden again if you want to but you don't have to. Last edited by Hokieman : 02-13-2008 at 02:52 AM. Reason: duplicated sentence

02-13-2008, 12:10 PM	#60
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Thanks, Hokieman! As soon as I can read those disks, I'll try that! __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?