I turned on one of my PCs the other day after plugging in another drive to check it. Obviously something went amiss as it would not boot up.

I was getting a msg ‘BOOTMGR is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart’.

WTF?

Looks like the Master Boot Record (MBR) had become corrupt. Fortunately there was an easy fix for this:

Disclaimer: Proceed at your own risk. I take no responsibility for any loss of data caused by the actions below.

* Find your Windows CD and boot off this (as if you were to reinstall)
* Enter recovery mode (Option R from the main screen)
* You will be prompted for the admin password. Enter it.
* Type in ‘fixboot’
* Type in ‘fixmbr’
* Type in ‘exit’

The PC should now boot and startup as per normal.

Good Luck!

In part 1 of this ‘project’ I described what we wanted to build, a rough budget and what sort of hardware we’d be looking at for the PC that I was building for a friend.

This post I will tell you what we ended up with – Amazing how much things change and how budget doesnt really come into it once you are at the PC shop

Anyway, here we go. This is what hardware we ended up with (and why):

Gigatbyte GA-MA790GP motherboard – not sure why this particular model, but I have alway trusted Gigabyte and I just wanted to make sure that it had enough SATA and USB connectors. Bonus is thus it has onboard firewire and HDMI (may be normal these and I’m just ignorant of technology).

AMD X4 Phenom2 Quad Core CPU – Now this was not one of the latest and greatest but still a nice CPU (which a good price tag). 10X better than what he had.

HIS PCI-E 1Gig HD4850 Graphics Card – recommended by a workmate. The 512M version was $7 cheaper so … why bother

Thermaltake V9 case – now this is a nice looking case. I wanted to get a Sunflower brand case but they came with only a small PSU, so I thought I’d get my mate a decent case (without PSU) and he could then select what to throw in it.

Coolermatser Real Power Pro 650 Watt PSU – Man, this thing was heavy, and the box it came in had it’s own handle. For the price, it would want to have a heap on connectors and be prety quiet (later we were to find we were not disappointed.

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Build me a PC part 2

One of my friends wanted me to build a PC from scratch, with the parts HE wanted (rather than a pre built one). So I thought ‘lets blog it from the very beginning to the end’.

The challenge – a decent PC (not for gaming but one with a bit of grunt and the ability to run some virtual OS’s too)
The budget – about AUD$500 but as a guide only. There was room for movement (just as well)

So the research began. AMD or intel CPU? What sort of motherboard? How much RAM? What sort of graphics card? And certainly how big a power supply to run it all? And after the hardware was sorted out, what OS did he want to run?

After much deliberation, we decided on the following hardware (or very similar):

AMD X4 Phenom II 9650 CPU (the general consensus was a quad core of some kind)
Gigabyte motherboard
4Gig RAM
Sunflower case of some sort (a workmate told me they are pretty good)
ATI graphics card (at least 512M)
1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD
SATA DVD burner

As far as the OS was concerned, my friend decided on wanting to run OpenSuse 11.1 as the main OS, and probably Vista X64 in a virtual image for the stuff he could not find Linux equivalents for.

So, off to the shop I went with him to buy all the gear.

Next post, I will share what harwdware we ended up getting and the total cost …..

Want a nice easy way to backup your firefox profile? I discovered one that is much easier to do than the manual method I posted on this webiste a few months ago. It’s call Mozbackup, and is a great piece of open source software.

To perform a backup, it’s real easy:

Run the program, and a window like this will come up:

Choose either to backup or restore. The next screen will ask you which profile you want to backup, and also where you want to save it:

After this, you will be asked whether you would like to set a password for the backup file. Choose your selection, and the following screen will allow you to select what items from your profile you wish to backup. I would say leave the defaults:

Easy as that! Done …….

Oh yeah …….. get it from here

I had some issues with my work laptop the other day and all my settings for my applications had been lost. Damn I thought, I’ve lost all my bookmarks and firefox settings. However I had backed up my profile a few days before but wasn’t sure how to move it to my new computer seamlessly.

After a bit of googling and trial & error, I found the following way to work the best:

1. Exit Firefox
2. Start -> Run -> type ‘%APPDATA%’
3. Select Mozilla -> Firefox -> Profiles
4. Copy profile folder (XXXXXXX.default) and paste it to desired location (eg. C:\Firefox\Profiles)
5. Start -> Run -> type ‘firefox.exe -ProfileManager’
6. Click ‘Create Profile’
7. Click ‘Choose Folder’
8. Select the newly copied folder (eg. C:\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXXX.default)
9. Now select the newly created profile and click ‘Start Firefox’ — check that all your cookies etc are there
10. Surf the net!