Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread II

[PlutonianEmpire]

You should leave 20-25% of your main drive free for swap files, de-fragging and so on. If you have only 3.63 Gb left, attempts to de-fragment your system will fail.

I posted a wee bit later that the problem corrected itself.

Regardless, new issue, same laptop (vista 32-bit sp 2). The CD/DVD drive appears on the device list, but it won't show up on My Computer, and it simply won't load any disk in it at all.

Any ideas?

 

[Zelig]

Might have simply failed. Optical drives are very much plug-and-play, there's not much troubleshooting to be done with them.

 

[Mise]

Unless it's an IRQ conflict

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Or possibly a loose cable; unplugging it and plugging it back in doesn't hurt.

 

[Souron]

Or possibly a loose cable; unplugging it and plugging it back in doesn't hurt.

It could. He said it's a laptop, so getting to the right cable ain't easy. Often the optical drive slides out separately, but taking it out and putting it back in isn't gonna do anything.

Chances are the drive's kaput, and there's not much to be done about it.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I have a tendency to forget how squished laptops are on the insides.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I used what little google skills I did have and I noticed that some ideas involved editing some registry keys or something like that, or something about getting the computer to recognize it again after a service pack causes it to not recognize the cd drive. Would that be of any help?

 

[Zelig]

Boot to a Linux distro, see if the CD drive works there.

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

Have you tried updating the optical drive's driver?

 

[Zelig]

Out of dozens of optical drives I've had/used, I've never seen any take drivers other than those included with Windows.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Have you tried updating the optical drive's driver?

Yes; didn't work.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Is there any way to get information off of a laptop's harddrive if the motherboard has failed?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Get an external hard drive enclosure, get the hard drive out (carefully), put it in the enclosure, and plug it into another computer.

You can probably also just put the drive directly into anothr computer (second drive, as booting from it probly won't work) but I forgot how.

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

Is there any way to get information off of a laptop's harddrive if the motherboard has failed?

Just plug it into the second port on your working laptop if it has a second port. You could also connect it to your desktop rig, disconnect the optical drive sata cable and hook it to the laptop hdd.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thanks. Does the fact that the hard drive in question contains the OS change anything?

 

[shadowplay]

Thanks. Does the fact that the hard drive in question contains the OS change anything?

The hard-drive you want to boot from will have to be plugged into SATA 0. Pay close attention to the writing on the motherboard when you go to plug the cable in. After that, it doesn't matter which SATA slot you plug your old HDD into (and won't matter that it has an OS on it since it won't try to boot from it).

 

[Atticus]

I'm trying to read a bmp file and get some strange results. If someone readily sees what is the problem, please tell. (If it takes real effort, don't do it for me )

Spoiler :

I use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format as a key to read the file. All integers are little endian.

0: 01000010
1: 01001101
^Bytes 0-1: Start of the header file: "BM" in ascii, as it should be
2: 00010110
3: 11000000
4: 01010000
5: 00000000
^Bytes 2-5: The whole file size, this says 656232 bits/bytes while the OS says "5,292,054 bytes" (they aren't the same even if the latter mean bits)
...
14: 00101000
15: 00000000
16: 00000000
17: 00000000
^ Bytes 14-17: DIB-header's size. This says 20, which according to Wikipedia isn't an option.
18: 10010000
19: 00000110
20: 00000000
21: 00000000
^Bytes 18-20: The width of the bitmap, a signed integer. It's really 1680 pixels, but I don't see how this could represent that.

 

[Souron]

I'm trying to read a bmp file and get some strange results. If someone readily sees what is the problem, please tell. (If it takes real effort, don't do it for me )

Spoiler :

I use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format as a key to read the file. All integers are little endian.

I don't know how you got the numbers you did for size, but I got what the OS says. Plug it into a calculator, lowest lines first.

0010 1000 is 40 not 20.

And the last one reads the same way as the size.

 

[Atticus]

Oh boy! So the little numbers are on the right on each byte. I thought the options were that they are on the right or on the left of the whole four byte thing.

Thanks a lot sir!

 

[dragonprobably]

What is defraging?