The Microsoft .NET magazine for Developers #5 (what a great title for a Dutch magazine!) has an article about Delphi 8 for .NET, written by Bob Swart. As one can expect from Bob, the article is clean, without prejudice and after reading it you can only think: why don’t I have a copy yet?! 😉
No link to the article, since the magazine is not an e-zine, but an old-fashioned paperstyle magazine.
Pfffff….back to “normal” operation again. In trying to get back to the right combination of settings, I only made things worse: Windows did not start at all anymore. Jikes! I started from the Windows XP disk, went for “Logon to exisiting installation” and saw that Windows reversed the drive letters of the IDE partitions: I was F and F was I. So….back to the BIOS, enable one of the two drives, and yes, there she blows was again. Reboot and enabled the other drive again, and now things are back to normal. WITH the annoying S.M.A.R.T. error message.
I must tell you: seeing messages like “NTLDR not found”, “Invalid system disk”, “Press any key to reboot” or just a blank screen when you expect the Windows XP login screen is as scary as it gets.
Because one of my drive reports via S.M.A.R.T. that a failure is imminent, I decided to turn of SMART. But, this Asus bios is not tricked easy: even with SMART off, it reports the error. So, I decided to switch of the IDE channel in the BIOS because my boot-device is a SCSI disk (IDE only used for storage). Windows booted fine, without the error.
But…you guessed it, Windows talked to the drive in PIO mode, no DMA at all. WTF? Back to the bios, let’s get the error and the speed back. Hey, there’s the error, but where’s Windows?
After several tries, reboots, settings, I can now only use my system with the IDE controller switched of in the BIOS, therefore the speed of this machine dramatically drops when I use the IDE disk.
Can someone explain this to me?