Tech That!

Update: It turns out the issue is even more general than I thought at first. It is in fact not just the HTC mobile sync program that causes these freezes; it is in fact any mobile syncing application. After launching the Sony Ericsson PC Suite today, I noticed that the issue returned immediately. I killed the process, and it ended again. Seems as though Windows 7 has issues dealing with mobile syncing software if the device is not connected..?

For the past couple of weeks, my graphics card had been acting up. Or so it seemed. Every 5-6 seconds, the screen would freeze for a brief moment – just long enough to notice. It was only the screen though, because music playing in the background would keep going, and any other application would proceed as though nothing had happened. This lead me to believe that my nVidia 8600 GT was to blame.

After looking around the web, I found that several people were complaining about random lag spikes with the newest nVidia drivers, and thus my suspicion was reinforced. I tried uninstalling the drivers, and installing 6 different, previous versions of the driver pack, but to no avail.

A couple of days ago I’d had enough – it is really annoying when the mouse stops moving every five seconds – and so I decided to order a brand new graphics card. After all, if the graphics card is acting up, what is more likely to fix the issue than a new graphics card?

Well, it arrived in the mail yesterday, and to my great surprise, the issue persisted. And this was an ATI card – no nVidia drivers were even installed on the system. The mystery remained.

In order to find the cause of these lags, I fired up the Task Manager and kept an eye on the CPU usage graph. It turned out that one of my CPU cores spiked at about 10% every time the screen froze. I switched to the process view, but there were no processes suddenly jumping to the top on every freeze… Odd.. There was a process called fsynsrvstarter – with the suspicious description “TODO: <description>” quite close to the top. It didn’t use any CPU, it just sat there.. And so I figured I’d Google it just in case.

At this point, I came across this forum post explaining that this process was spawned every 4 seconds by HTC Sync. This seemed as though it aligned too perfectly with my spikes, so I decided to uninstall HTC Sync and see what happened. And what do you know? The spikes were gone..

So, I now own two graphics cards (albeit one somewhat outdated) which both work well, but are brought to their knees by such a complex piece of software as a mobile phone syncing program (an inactive one at that).

I hope this post will solve your problem before you decide to buy a new card like I did.

I have recently bought two external SATA docking stations – one internal ( i.e. it fits in a 5.25″ bay, and loads the drive from the outside like a large floppy ), and the other one completely external and connected through eSATA. For the first couple of weeks, I thought hot-swapping was not possible with these, and kept rebooting if I wanted to swap out a drive, however one day I came across a setting in BIOS describing how SATA drives should be treated. It was set to “IDE compatible”.. The other options were “Enhanced” and “AHCI”. I tried googling this, and soon found that AHCI is actually a technology that enables plenty of the cool features of the SATA technology – most notably hot-swapping!

I enabled AHCI, booted up the computer, and Windows 7 presented me with a BSOD… Again, Google was my friend, and I found several other people who got the same problem when enabling AHCI after install. It seems as though Windows 7 checks for AHCI when installed, and determines then whether to load the AHCI drivers or not.. It then never checks again…. Smart…

Luckily, there is a solution.. First you have to get back into Windows my resetting the SATA drives to “IDE compatible” mode. Next, open up the registry explorer, and follow this guide: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976. If it is already set to 0, set it to 1, then to 0 again, and reboot. Now, set the drives to AHCI in BIOS, and reboot again. Hopefully your Windows should start up without a bluescreen.

Now, all your SATA drives will appear  when you use the “Safely remove device” icon near the clock in the bottom right corner. If you choose to remove a drive, you can eject it from there and then take it out and put in a new one. This is where the problems start to arrive though. Sometimes, this approach works without a problem, but sometimes Windows simply goes silent, and acts as though nothing has been connected at all. Other times, it tells you that it has found partitions, but that they are in RAW format, and have to be reformatted!

After living with this for a couple of days, I decided that there had to be a more stable way of doing this, and that was when I came across HotSwap!. This piece of software is made for managing hot-swap drives in Windows, and once installed, allows you not only to scan for new drives ( and load them properly! ), but also to safely remove them AFTER doing a spin-down.

After running this stand-alone .exe, you can set it to autostart with Windows. After that, whenever you want to swap a drive, just right-click the hotswap icon at the bottom right near your clock, safely remove the device you want to swap, exchange the drives and choose “Scan for changes” in the HotSwap! menu and up comes your drive!

Happy hot-swapping!

This week I have been setting up my new computer – a complete beast with Intel Quad Core i7 processor, 12 GB memory, 4 * 1TB drives in RAID 1+0, etc. On this computer, I decided to put both Windows 7, which is provided for free through the MSDN Academic Alliance and Arch Linux ( which I fell in love with the first time I tried it ).

Since getting an account with MSDN took a while, I decided to put Arch on the box first, even though the Windows bootloader is known to foul up GRUB and make it impossible to boot into linux.

First step was installing Arch.. Usually, this is quite hassle free, but because of the slow internet at the accomodation center at Bond University, I downloaded the Net Install CD so that I could install and download only what I needed. Sounds logical, right? Well, not when I tell you that, as I discovered, you have to login to access the wired network. When opening a browser, you’re presented with a login screen though HTTPS, that has to be completed every time your IP changes. Problem is, the netinstall CD has no browser installed as it is command-line only, and as such, I had no way of authenticating with the network, which again lead me to being unable to download any packages for my system. So, what do you do?

Logging into an HTTPS proxy through command line tools

My first though was to use links or lynx ( text-based unix browsers ), however neither were available on the netinstall CD, and I couldn’t compile either from source since the build tools and dependencies were not there. At this point, I was certain I would have to download the full Arch install CD, and start all over again, however, I was not prepared to give up that easily. There is a reason I use Arch – to understand how things work from the ground up, and to force myself into exploring Linux.

At first, the only solution I could think of was to telnet into the login server over HTTPS, send the proper POST headers by hand, and thereby become authenticated. Finding the correct headers on my laptop was not a problem, however hand-typing them onto the linux shell posed a problem. Not in getting it right, but because the HTTPS connection of the login server had a timeout for requests at about 10 seconds… The end request looked something like this:

POST /login.pl HTTP/1.1
Host: login.bond.edu.au
Connection-type: keep-alive
Keep-alive: 300
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 112

_FORM_SUBMIT=1&which_form=reg&source=<my IP>&destination=&error=&bs_name=<Student ID>&bs_password=<URL encoded password>

As you can probably imagine, hand-typing that in 10 seconds is not an easy task. Evidently it was not going to work, which was why I started exploring the unix philosophy of separation of tasks. Why should I type all that text, why couldn’t the computer type it for me? I created a file with the request, and used the unix command “cat” to print the file. I then piped the output through my telnet connection as such:

cat request | telnet login.bond.edu.au 443

To my surprise, this just caused the connection to time out without any error message… After trying a multitude of alternative versions of the above, I concluded that parts of the request was probably printed to the server before the connection was actually established, which caused the server to disconnect the session.

I felt quite lost, and was very close to getting a full Arch install ( and thereby have to wait for about 5-6 hours for the download to complete… ), when I remembered the “wget” command. This is a command that allows you to download files from the web through HTTP/HTTPS/SCP/SFTP/FTP. Maybe it could also send a POST request?

Not only was wget included in the netinstall CD, but after looking at the manpages, I also found the argument “–post-file”, which allows you to send urlencoded data through POST when submitting the request. I was saved! I stripped everything except the data from my request file, and issued the following command:

wget --post-file request --save-cookies s.cookie https://login.bond.edu.au/login.pl

Looking at the downloaded HTML file, I soon found that I had successfully been logged in, and I could start the actual installation!

Both the installation, and the subsequent configuration ( installation of GNOME, setting up drivers, etc.. ) posed no problem as usual, though it all took quite a while having to download it all though the 1 Mbit/s throttled connection at the student residences. Next morning however, my computer was up and running just the way I wanted it. Windows 7 next…

Windows 7

First of all, I had to download Windows 7 from MSDN, which proved to be impossible from linux. It provided a downloader, which, when run through wine, simply refused to download the file properly.. In the end, I had to download the ISO on my laptop ( running Vista ), and burn the DVD from there. From here, the ride was smooth. Installation of Windows 7 was both painless and fast, and I was up and running in 30 minutes. Great!

Next was getting GRUB back on the MBR, since Windows overrides all other bootloades when installed. At first, I tried looking for a windows installer that could restore GRUB to the MBR, but this does not seem to be available, so I had to get down and dirty with the unix command line again. Hooray! =D

I rebooted, and started up from the Arch installation CD. From there, you have two options to restore the grub. Both involve getting your original Linux partition mounted, and then running grub-install from there.

1. Boot the Arch Linux Live CD, mount your linux partition using “mount /dev/sd** /media/fl” where ** is the device and partition of your Linux boot partition. Next, you have to run: “grub-install –root-directory=/media/fl /dev/sd*” where * is the device you wish to boot from..

2. Open the “More Options” selection on the boot screen of the CD, and then highlight the option “[EDIT ME] Boot Linux Directly”. Next, press ‘e’ to edit the line. Here, edit the line “root (hd0,0)” to match your device and partition. Next, edit the two other lines, and change /vmlinuz and /kernel ( can’t remember the exact filenames ) to read “/boot/vmlinuz” and “/boot/kernel” respectively. Due note that these are the default paths, but yours might differ. Also, you might have to change the line that contains “root=/dev/sda3″ to fit your setup. Finally, press ‘b’ to boot the linux partition. You will now find yourself in your normal Linux install. From there, you can run “grub-install /dev/sd**” as in 1.

Why the two options? For some reason I didn’t think of the first option until after I did #2. Maybe it will come in useful at some time…?

Now, to get Windows available from GRUB, edit “/boot/grub/menu.lst”, and uncomment the Windows lines at the bottom, and input the correct device and partition.

And then, you’re done! Congratulations! You’re dual-booting Windows 7 and Linux