Handtops, UMPC - FlipStart Broke!!

03/24/08 + wodin

Well I flipped open my FS this morning and it got to the widows XP screen with the little dute running across the screen and it just stayed there. I shut it off and re-started in safe mode and it got as far as kmxstart.sys and hung there!

I called Dynamism and spoke to a nice young man named Scott. He said it sounds like a corrupted windows installation, and I should reload windows. No ----- Sherlock!

First problem, I don't think there was a recovery disk in the package. I may be mistaken, but I'm at work now and will have to go home to tear the package apart looking for a CD.

Second problem, ten years experience as a PC tech, and eight years experience as an IT manager after that tells me that windows installations don't just corrupt themselves. Bad sectors on the HDD causes corruption. Bad sectors were once normal, but today they are unacceptable and will only become worse!

Now if this thing wasn't under warranty, I'd take this as a excuse to upgrade the drive to 60 or 80 GB, but since I'd have to break the stupid warranty void sticker to do that ... well I guess I'll just let Dynamism and/or Vulcan fix it, but it better pass a chkdsk once I get it running again!

03/24/08 + Nobody99

Windows installations can corrupt and crash for many different reasons, I doubt it is a bad sector. Could it be possble that the problem was caused by malware?

The recovery CD is overkill, it will erase everything and you will lose all data with it being set back to factory defaults. This is exactly why I backup the entire Flipstart Hard Disk at the partition level. If you can get access to an XP CD, you can use this to load the Recovery Console or BartPE.

03/24/08 + Joshua

Only 8 years? Dude. Way to make me feel old.

Bad sectors were never normal. Or never abnormal, but were easily mapped out. Crashing can mess up the directory structure and it's always best to start off with some decent disk recovery software (not Windows recovery) to actually check the drive first. Windows installations don't corrupt per se, but they sure as hell can be corrupted by all sort of things which you wouldn't have considered or "caused" as such - so they can appear to have become corrupted.

I'd be inclined to say "Screw the warranty" and upgrade the HD anyway myself.

03/24/08 + wodin

[quote-Joshua]Only 8 years? Dude. Way to make me feel old.[/quote]All that was after a full career (23 years) in the Navy and several years of retirement. Dude, you AIN'T old!

Once upon a time, when IBM first started making PCXTs and they had 10 MB (yup that's right MegaByte) MFM full height hard drives that alone were about four times the size and weight of a FlipStart they used to come out of the factory with built in bad sectors.

That's why PC-DOS and MS-DOS Vs. 1.0 had a utility called CHKDSK that could detect and mark bad sectors so they wouldn't be used. The number of KB that was lost to bad sectors was considered to be negligible because 10 MB was more storage space than anyone would EVER need.

Before long manufacturing processes advanced to the point where bad sectors were neither expected nor accepted, but chkdsk survived. And if it found any bad sectors it indicated that the drive's media was in the process of deteriorating and the drive was failing.

There are several causes for corrupted data, one is losing power before the buffer is properly written and flushed, one is software that incorrectly writes the data, one is the OS not properly updating the tables for whatever reason (again usually loss of power) but they can generally be broken down to one of three reasons.
1. bad software.
2. improper procedure.
3. broken hardware.

Now I think that in my case, the cause of the corrupted data was letting the battery die with the computer in standby (improper procedure) but that most certainly does not rule out the other two.

03/24/08 + Joshua

Bad sectors still exist, they're just mapped out during a low-level format. chkdsk has as much to do with floppy drives as it does to do with HDs!

My FlipStart's battery has died with it in standby many times, but I've never had a problem with it. Most problems I've had with failing HDs in terms of bad sectors have been due to:

Excessive heat - I had one machine in particular that was armed with a 9.1GB HD in 1996/7 that failed in summer, constantly. Adding additional cooling didn't help much, but winter came and it behaved fine.
Mechanical failure - one brand in particular suffered from breakup of rubber/silicone components in the unit, causing a: the drive head to stuck when parked (more of an issue in modern, power-saving days where drives are often 'sleeping' when not used - quite a common failure on iPods, too). This is your broken hardware bit.

Bad software is, IMO, more likely than anything else. I had a Dell which despite my best efforts, ended up riddled with malware, and attempts to remove it invariably resulted in Windows crashing and burning. It also suffered the heat issue too. I'm thinking that heat is a good runner-up possibility in the FlipStart.

03/25/08 + wodin

Well, Scott was right about one thing. There really was a recovery DVD in the box. Now all I need is a USB DVD Reader/Writer. I've got a couple of CD R/W but no DVD. Oh well, I needed one anyway.

03/25/08 + mildness

Once upon a time, when IBM first started making PCXTs and they had 10 MB (yup that's right MegaByte) MFM full height hard drives

You need a reset wodin. (;-{)}

The first IBM PC hard disks were *5* MB in size. My 10MB was aftermarket and boy did I brag about having all that space!

Peace,

Bill

03/25/08 + wodin

Oh yea! that was PC-ATs that had 10 MB. I wouldn't know first hand 'cause my first 8086 PC was a Sanyo with two 180 KB floppie drives, no hard drive and 256KB of ram. You could double the RAM by soldering another RAM chip piggyback to each of the installed ones. You had to bend up the address pins though or the poor little caterpillers would get confused and refuse to remember anything.

My first Hard drive was in a home brew PC-XT clone that had a half height 20 MB drive. Wow! 20 MB in half the space. Now that was HUGE!

03/26/08 + LMc

wodin, you are showing your age! I too had the Sanyo, a PC "Compatible" that would end up NOT running Lotus 1-2-3. I got 128K version with a single side floppy drive . . .told my wife that would always be enough disk storage!

03/26/08 + wodin

LMc said: "NOT running Lotus 1-2-3. I got 128K version with a single side floppy drive"

Oh but it would. The problem was the Sanyo mapped the video to page B of the bios, but Lotus expected it to be on page F and bypassed the bios video writes, and directly wrote page F. There was an alternative MS-DOS.SYS file you could run that would intercept the page F video writes and remap them to page B. Then Lotus 123 would work fine.

As I recall that old Sanyo cost an even grand new in the box. I guess some things never change.

edited: Mar 26 2008 + jobjob

Hi wodin,
i own no flipstart but had have more then one time a main boot problem with my lovely 01.
With the help of a startup disk and many time i could wake it up again.
Each time reason for the problem was a corrupt file.
After disable the "Write-behind caching" function i never had this again.
Most Windows systems, by default, have write-behind caching enabled. This speeds up disk-write operations by holding data in memory until the computer thinks it is the right time to write it to disk. This same system can also cause conflicts with shared files and networked software .... Because the data is not being written directly to the hard drive on the spot, delays imposed by caching can cause a server or workstation to become confused and to cause data corruption. If this happens, the computer�s 'disk write caching' functions should be disabled.
Start at the desktop.
Right-click on My Computer, then left-click on Properties.
Click on the Hardware tab at the top.
Click on the Device Manager button.
Click on the + next to Disk Drives to expand it.
Right click on the hard drive on which to turn write caching off, then left click Properties.
Click on the Policies tab.
Click on Enable write caching on the disk to remove the tick. It must not be ticked.
Click OK.

JJ

03/26/08 + wodin

Thanks JJ, I'll try that when I get the FS back up. I went to BestBuy last night and bought a portable DVD, so when I can put a few minutes together ...

03/26/08 + jobjob

Good luck and if you have a software that is speeding the shutdowntime cause of closing every task automaticly at once then you should disable this too.
My problem was named "WINDOWS/system32/config/system faild". Tutorials via Google.

03/27/08 + Nobody99

I didn't have an external USB DVD drive either so I just purchased a 5.25 external caddy and fitted one my internal DVD's I have lying about inside of it and it worked fine.

03/27/08 + wodin

Well it works again, and I didn't even need the portable DVD. When I plugged it in and started the FS, I missed the "hit the ANYkey to boot from CD" and it went to the hard drive.

It finally got around to remembering that I had told it to do a chkdsk before, and went ahead and checked the disk. Chkdsk must have found something wrong and fixed it 'cause it's been working fine ever since.

So now I have this great huge ugly portable Pioneer DVD burner! Oh well, I needed one anyway.