Jim "jimmsta" Gall's Blog

Today, I was greeted with my video card failing. Lovely. Apple charged me an arm and a leg for the card back in May or June of 2008. It didn’t make it 2 years without causing me problems. Funny thing is, the card that shipped with the machine (7300GT w/256mb VRAM) seems to perform as well as the 8800gt has for some time, which leads me to believe that it has been failing for a long time.

I pulled the card out, after both OSX and Windows 7 froze up. OSX actually seemed to push the hardware to the point where it showed lots of artifacts on the screen. I then pulled the card, took off the heatsink, removed all the old thermal paste, and applied some good Arctic Silver 5. I put it all back together, plopped it into the machine, and found that the damage was already done.

Now, with the 7300gt back in, I can see a lot of things were going wrong with the 8800 for a while – specifically, the text on the screen in certain places (both 2d and 3d) is more crisp. The framerates in World of Warcraft were about the same as with the 8800 – 24 to 36 or so.

I found that the fan on the GPU had a missing blade, which explains why the card seemed to be very loud. The problem I have is that it was ALWAYS loud, which makes me wonder if the card was defective from Apple.

In any case, I read up on what most other Mac Pro 1,1 owners are doing in terms of graphics card upgrades, and found that people are taking PC cards, and flashing the BIOS over to the Mac-compatible EFI. I then picked up the needed parts – another power cable for the card, from ATI, and a new ATI Radeon HD4870 w/1gb VRAM. ATI FlashTool is a godsend, as it will make it possible to easily flash the card over to the Mac EFI bios. Overall, I guess it was time for an upgrade (the radeon is dx10.1 w/1gb, while the 8800 was dx10.0 w/512mb). All in all, time will tell whether it was worth fixing this machine or not.

To start off the new year, I started my job back at the old place. I’m back to being a computer janitor (tech)! I’ve little time for BootZilla (weekends I guess will have to do), but whatever.

I’m still looking into porting dd-wrt to the Belkin N+, but I haven’t got a lot of free time anymore, and I’m not a programmer, which hampers my abilities quite a lot. I’ve been known to be able to figure things out (php, for instance), without knowing the language, but since I can’t even get Belkin’s own firmware to compile properly in any version of Linux (Debian standard, Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, Gentoo, you name it), I feel that project is severely out of my reach, at least for now.

Overall, my lookout on life has changed, as I’m heading down to NC in a month or so, to work on my obesity problem. I hope to gain some valid lifestyle changes, to help me on my quest to getting thin(ner). Chances are that I won’t be giving time to so much in the way of these research projects, unfortunately.

And with that, 2010 is off to a start. A good start, at least for me and my convoluted life.

This post outlines all topics for discussion of the upcoming BootZilla version 6.0.

First and foremost, the project will employ a build-system already in existence, which already has support scripts for many of the functions that BootZilla has offered in years past. The switch over to Winbuilder has been planned for several years now, and will finally become a reality.

What this means: BootZilla is moving on to become a bootable Windows PE-based recovery environment.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem that has kept me from moving BZ to this platform, and it’s a technical limitation of the Windows architecture.
*TECHY STUFF FOLLOWS*

Problem #1: The Windows PE registry is loaded without any regard for any pre-existing OS on any installed hard drive. The problem is that many applications aren’t designed to read from other registry hives than the ones in %SYSTEM32%\Config. This brings about a large set of problems, many of which have been sorta-solved by the use of Remote Registry editor PE, or regscanner. The limitation with these utilities, however, is that many anti-malware software is not designed to look inside of anything other than HKLM\Software in the registry, which is not useful, as once Windows PE boots, it loads its own registry, and no current utility will even attempt to merge the data on the hard drive with the in-memory registry data….

Solution: Write a few apps -> One program that would keep track of the PE registry, and one that would merge the in-ram registry with a copy of the on-disk registry, allow modifications to be made to keys in that merged copy, then export and do a diff operation on the resulting exported registry, with the PE in-memory registry data removed, and any preceeding data other than deleted keys re-appended to the exported file (a diff of the PE registry data with the on-disk registry data would probably suffice).

Problem #2: Legality of distributing a pre-built ISO image.
Solution: Don’t provide a pre-compiled ISO on my webhost, but put it up for download on a torrent tracker. The project would be buildable by anyone with a valid XP license (then again, I’m not so sure that I’ll be using XP : / )

Problem #3: Ease of Use
Solution: The LiveXP project, based on Winbuilder, has provided in the past, a full Winbuilder install with their project builder files. All you do is press the Play button, and follow the directions. It’s really simple to distribute.

I’ll probably try to make the main problem more clear at some point… maybe with a diagram of what I’m getting at.