sda capture blog

the next thing that happened was that v4 (my old 1.1 ghz athlon) died. it was the damnedest thing - i was taking a disc out of the optical drive, and as the drive tray was retracting, it was as if the power was cut to the machine. the tray stood about two thirds of the way retracted, so i had to close it the rest of the way manually. i tried everything: plugging the machine in somewhere else, disconnecting the monitor and all the usb stuff, opening up the case and watching for dead fans, everything. no dice. it would turn on, but after two, maybe three seconds, it would go into what looked like a sleep or low power mode, with the power led still lit, yet none of the case buttons were responsive. i had to turn the power supply off to get it to turn off.

well, i thought ... v5 has no choice but to live up to the hype now!

so i dismantled both machines and transferred all my stuff over from v4 to v5. this included a floppy drive, my dvd burner, two maxtor 250 gig ata/133 disks, my old soundblaster live 5.1 and the new tv wonder elite. i was very impressed by hp's proprietary mounting system: you screw in the mounting screws on one side of the drive before you put the drive in, and then the drive slides down rails, and one of the screws is caught by a piece of green plastic that holds the drive in place. to remove the drive, you just lift up on the plastic catch and slide the drive out. because the case screws are also human-operable, this means that you can realistically do all kinds of work inside the computer without ever needing to touch a tool (except for some indoor plumbing or something to ground yourself first, of course).

i had to change the boot order in the bios (windoze kept trying to boot from v4's old c: drive and failing), but with that done, everything proceeded well. i tested out capture and dvd duplication and things looked good there, or at least as good as i expected them to ... v4's death is actually significant for at least one reason, that being that i as yet have not been able to capture pal properly using the new tv wonder elite. the problem is not that the card does not understand a pal signal; the problem is that i can't seem to change the output resolution of the card to anything other than 720x480 or (in ntsc mode) 720x240. this is unacceptable for pal, as the bottom (576 - 480) lines are cut off. i've tried asking in several places to get answers on this to no avail, but i'm still holding out for a solution lest i have to deal with returning the card and paying $200 more for a pci-x aiw (as explored in previous entries here).

luckily, i managed to capture the latest prince of persia run (pal) with v4 before it died. i'll have to rerecord and sync the audio, as the level mysteriously went up to several hundred percent higher than it was supposed to be about one third through the capture, but i'll take that over not being able to capture the run any day.

i've already packaged up the v4 motherboard and its agp aiw and addressed the box to radix, so he should get his "new" computer and capture assembly right after xmas. here's hoping it was the power supply that was bad and that i didn't just send him a dead motherboard ...