AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Tips hat to Strategia

Right. I've decided that my system is suficiently fubared to require a format & reinstall, but I've run into a wee problem. When I run the installer, my (Microsoft, of all things) keyboard doesn't work. It's got the lights on when the machine boots up, they stay on while the installer is copying all the initial files, and then go off when the you get to the 'Starting Windows Setup' phase, just before the first screen comes up asking you which partition you want to install on.

I've tried everything I can think of, just having the keyboard alone plugged in, and tried every USB port on the machine, all to the same effect. I was thinking to maybe disable one of the USB controllers until I found out I only had one.

Does anybody have any ideas on what to do? Besides eviscerating the WinXP programmers, coz aside from making me feel better, that won't help.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Your key board might need to be replaced? The port on your MB for your key board might be bad.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Snip
Snip
Snip

There's your problem. Most USB devices don't work until the machine is at least halfway booted up, as there's some fun stuff the computer has to do with drivers that can't easily be done with just the stuff in the boot sector. As near as I can tell, you need to do one of the following:
1) Borrow a keyboard from somewhere that isn't a USB keyboard, and use that for the installation process (not hard, but not always possible when a cheapskate manufacurer decides that USB is THE way to go, and doesn't include the standard ports for a keyboard and mouse).
2) Get an automatic installation CD for your chosen OS, so that no input is required at install time (difficult, but WILL work if you can arrange it)
3) Remove the hard drive you plan on installing the OS into, put it into a different machine (as the only HD), install the chosen OS on that, then put the hard drive in your machine (putting the host machine back into it's starting conditions, of course); will be buggy.

Well, there's three things for you to try, at least....

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

There are adaptors that go from USB to PS2 connectors for keyboards. They are fairly inexpensive and can usualy be found at Radio Shack or its counterparts.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

That partly depends on the specific keyboard/mouse; for a while, I had a USB mouse plugged into my PS2 port via an adapter; the buttons wore out, so I got another USB mouse ... which wasn't compatible with the adapter (although that was fine - had spare USB ports); now, I have a wireless USB keyboard and mouse; both work great, although I still have the previous keyboard if I need it, and I almost never have to touch anything in the boot-up process....

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

3 is not a good idea if you use NTFS... Windows will not boot up if you change the motherboard and/or CPU on it. I think this is just when you install on NTFS partition, but am not sure if it applies to FAT32 with any WinNT line.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Yep. Hence, putting it dead last, and the "will be buggy" tag at the end. But it's something to try if the first two options either don't work or aren't remotely feasable. After all, if, after attempting that, he has to wipe his hard drive again, he really isn't any worse off, other than time spent....

But hey, opening up a computer to pull components is fun, so long as you have a reason for it and a hope of accomplishing something....

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Although... I wonder what would happen if you just get to the first reboot, but don't complete the installation and swap hardware then.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Try unplugging the board and re-pluging it into another port. Also check the bios, some boards need to have a setting enabled for USB keboard support from bios. And lastly, some old boards can't support usb keybords during setup.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

This new Pheonix/Award BIOS I have now is the only one I've ever had that supports anything USB, and yeah I had to manually turn on that setting. Go grab that old PS2 keyboard over there under your sweatpants in the closet...

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

USB keyboard support is a little iffy still. A lot of the systems that I order have a preinstalled image that I provide from a running system. The end user still has to boot the system and connect the keyboard after windows loads. And yes, there are some PS2’s on the shelf in the back room just in case. Actually, most of the systems coming in now don’t have any PS2 sockets.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

No PS2 sockets?! Oh noes! Thanks for the advice folks, turned out scrounging a USB-PS2 adapter out the the ole box o' spare parts did the job nicely.
Unfortunately I seem to have nuked a lot of stuff that I thought was on my main partition, but turned out to be on my Windows partition. Like my bookmarks. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
More importantly though, I wiped off a really handy little CD-MP3 ripper, and now that I'm in the mood to convert some of my collection for my MP3 player, I can't remember the name of it. Anyone have any suggestions for a simple, FREE (not shareware, but acutally free), MP3 ripper?

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Exact Audio Copy is the best ripping program, and it is totally free.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Glad to be of help.

Re: AZ: Fear & Loathing in the land of Microsoft
 

Also... unless you have a cheap portable music player that only plays MP3s, I suggest you look into ripping to Ogg Vorbis format. Its algorithms allow for higher quality encoding at lower bitrates, thus saving file size. 192 kbps Ogg Vorbis sounds a hell of a lot better than 192 kbps MP3. Even 128 kbps Ogg Vorbis sound fairly good, which can't be said for MP3.

Of course, the best would be to rip to a lossless format such as FLAC, but that can eat a lot of hdd space. They are about 300 MB or so per album. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

If you don't like EAC, you could get Foobar2000, a really good music player that can also convert audio files (such as the .cda files on a CD) to a ton of different formats just by selecting them from a playlist and choosing Convert from right click menu. You might need the "special" installer to get the convert plugin by default. You do not get as exact copies as with EAC, but it is probably easier to use.

Either of these can plug in to FREEDB for getting album and track info for the meta tags.