Build Advice New build questions ?

[Richard1234]

You have summed up stupidity pretty well. Simpler and less risky is preferable to a haphazard, learn on the go "MO", which isn't an MO really.

this is why I was experimenting, as I could make my mistakes where it didnt matter, as I was going to reformat all that and start again once I had learnt from the mistakes. and with that I ran into a plethora of elusive obstructions.

once the installs are permanent, I keep to what I already know for sure,
if I were to experiment I would backup the entire disk first which costs some 3 hours, and further hours if it has to be reinstated.


now things went fine until I tried installing on a 2nd drive, and then everything went to pot.

this is where USAFRet's advice got me out of that, to disconnect everything except what is necessary, which is 2 drives, the installer and the target.

now last night I left the MSI driver installer running and then the MSI center installer which installs various further programs, and that took hours. then when I went to bed I set up Linux shell commands to backup both drives, but the Linux DVD wouldnt load, and instead I just got windows 10. verified I had set in the UEFI first boot device the USB CD DVD, and 2nd boot device the windows loader for the main win10 install.

tried again, and again the LInux disk didnt boot, instead getting win10. then scrutinising I realised its because of the MSI driver installer drive that I had just been installing! as that manifests as a CD drive, and by chance the 10 port socket it is attached to must be earlier than the one for the optical drive, so the mobo tries it, fails, and tries the win bootloader instead.

I disconnected the MSI driver installer thumbdrive, and now Linux booted fine.

I then realised this is probably why the win 10 installer thumbdrive failed originally before I used USAFRet's MO of removing everything, I think the MSI thumbdrive must have been ahead of it in the mobo's enumeration,
and this would also explain mystifying times when the optical drive wouldnt load.

the mobo enumerator appears to class disks into genres, and only test 1 of each genre, if that fails, it skips the rest of that genre, and goes to the next genre. so if by chance you connect to the USB sockets in the wrong sequence, a drive wont boot! if I experiment I can maybe decipher the entire enumeration sequence, some of the sequence can be specified in the UEFI.



I have here a photo of the win10 bluray installer options:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/win10/win_install_drive.jpg

just by looking at that, I can tell you what is going on:

the 309.9GB is the first scratch install of win10, as its not the full 310.5GB, as there are 2 administrative partitions on either side, automatically generated by the earlier install. the highlighted partition is thus the scratch install of win11, eg the entire 310.5GB disk free.

here is a photo of the Linux GParted program:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/win10/Linux_Mint_GParted.jpg

just by looking at that I can tell what is going on, the 620.35GB being a bit less than the intended 621 means that is the main win10 install, and I havent yet installed the main win11 install yet, and would be moving towards that.

there is a 2nd essential program on the Linux Mint side, which is the Disks program, this is necessary to make NTFS partitions writable, where I make just one writable which is the "Large" that you see in the task bar, as that is one ginormous almost 4T workspace from the 4T Samsung 990 Pro. eg the compressed backups last night of both 2T 990 Pro's went to there, where the one disk took 2 hours 13 mins, and the other disk took 2 hours 53 mins.

with my MO, if you refuse to use Linux, then you just need to remove all other disks with boot loaders, and also any disk with CD filing system which isnt the installer. I think other optical drives should be alright provided no disk in the drive.

with my MO, the first thing you need to do is a "site survey" of all attached disks. to discern an aeriel view as to what each is. by which on the Windows side I mean this view, which is well hidden to on Windows:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/win10/2024_05_18_0256_disk_overview.png

Not all thermal paste is created equal.

Here's roundup of thermal pastes, that TH is keeping up to the date,
article: https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-thermal-paste

At the bottom of the article is thermal paste comparison.

Thermal paste that i have, is Arctic Cooling MX-4. I have entire syringe (tube) of this thing:

I will have to study that, what I need is whatever is optimal for this specific configuration.

One of the reasons why i suggested full-tower ATX was to give you more space regarding cable management. Behind MoBo tray, there is enough space to route the cables. And if PSU shroud gets into way, remove it completely. After all, PSU shroud is just for eyecandy. It serves no practical purpose.

I thought maybe the L shaped PSU cover plate was to shield from heat, but you think its entirely eye candy?

its a bit of a nuisance to remove to attach further PSU cables, as it has 3 thumbscrews on the opposite side to the door, ie you have to remove the side panel, then remove 3 thumbscrews, then precariously remove the plate as you have to dodge obstructions. and then later the reverse process of all this.

I will try your suggestions as regards cable decluttering, and also will try to take some photos.

the PC is quite heavy, and I may have to detach various cables to photograph it properly from several angles, but I will try to do this later.

one problem is when I take photos, its not the same as seeing the actual machine, things which are obvious with the actual machine, are non obvious in a photo, now this is partly a matter of photographic skill,

right now I have been installing various software I use, and I want to try and reinstall properly the Amiga emulator. that has various stuff on the data disk borrowed from the 2010 PC, where I need to return that to the 2010 PC to borrow various settings. Before that I plan to migrate all that to maybe the 4T drive, or maybe the 2T drive with the scratch partitions.

with migrating it, I also need to do a verify that all the files are copied verbatim and not just hope for the best.

I tried installing the Amiga emulator on the very first scratch install of win 10 64 bit many weeks ago, but it was unsatisfactory graphics, nowhere near as good as on the 2010 PC. My memory with the 2004 PC was that the emulator graphics only became good after I installed a graphics card. I think there is a new version of the emulator for 64 bit windows, so there is a bit of work to arrange it.

next on my agenda is to install the bluray burning software from Cyberlink and Corel, including upsell. both of which involve ginormous downloads which took many hours to download! which you can see in the screenshot are 20.93GB of install files!

either or both of the bluray burners only work on win10, not on win11!

this is another reason why I need both win10 and win11.

 

[Aeacus]

I thought maybe the L shaped PSU cover plate was to shield from heat, but you think its entirely eye candy?

In airflow aspect it actually makes it worse, separating bottom part of the PC case from the rest. And it's main purpose is to hide the PSU and cables coming from PSU. So, you can freely remove it.

I, personally, don't like PSU shroud, hence why i don't have them. Only my AMD build has it, but it can't be removed. Then again, that Sharkoon PC case is one of the very few ones with green interior, which i needed for build theme.

Initially, PSU shrouds were regarded as DIY projects, with several enthusiasts crafting unique concealments by utilizing a wide variety of materials. Some builders fashioned custom shrouds from fiberglass, plexiglass, or even aluminum, whereas others resorted to 3D printing for designing colored polymer covers.

Consequently, manufacturers recognized this emerging trend and included PSU shrouds in almost every PC case that shipped with a transparent side panel. Nowadays, you no longer need to rely on DIY solutions as budget PC cases often arrive with built-in shrouds, elevating the visual appeal of your custom build.

Source: https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-a-psu-shroud/

 

[Richard1234]

first a progress report:

I have learnt some really crazy things today!

I did a small shopping excursion, and decided to get some of the very time consuming installs going for the main win11 install whilst shopping,

when I returned all completed,

then I installed some software from maybe 10 years ago, and then win11 bricked up!

this same software install bricked up one of the win11 installs from weeks ago, I did manage with much difficulty to get out of it then, but this time the tricks didnt work. I did eventually manage to get to win10 by running the Linux UEFI boot option, which fixes some stuff en route. and then once on win10 to change the default boot OS.

now in recent days I did a full backup of both OS disks after installing for the main win10 install all the drivers and a lot of software, (and plenty more to go also), but only the base install for all 3 other OSes, ie no driver install yet, so in particular no bluetooth and no internet, although Linux seems able to do both without a driver install!

the base install is when you finally have the desktop for the first time.

so the initial plan was to reinstate that backup and junk that install of win11. but then I thought to try some less time expensive experiments, then en route I thought: maybe someone out there knows how to edit the windows bootloader.

after a lot of searching around, where every place said something quite different, and all were true, I got some great info about how to construct a bootloader for just 1 install of Windows. but couldnt find any info on a loader for more than one OS other than the MO of removing the other OS drive for a dual loader.

so I then thought: maybe if I use the MO twice it might create a double loader, as the only other option was to overwrite the main disk anyway, no harm in trying. and then I thought I'd push my luck, and get all 4 OSes loading from the same bootloader, to load all 4 from the bootloader of the disk with the scratch installs.

and it worked!

BUT that win11 install is 100% broken, the other 3 load fine, that win11 one appeared in the loader but doesnt load. I tried repair, but this says you can only repair a booted OS.

so I then reinstalled that win11, tried the problem software install differently, and this time I changed the default OS to be the main win10 one in case it bricked up, and the trick to change default OS from the desktop is via a program called msconfig, something I learnt from one of the places online.

and of course it bricked up again!

so I reinstalled win11 again, and this time decided that after installing the software that broke win11 not just twice today, but also some weeks ago, and it also broke my 2023 win11 laptop, where the shop in town had to reinstall win11 again, that I would this time upgrade win11 in the same session without affecting apps and data, and I had to trawl around through the jungle of notes for the trick, as I had forgotten!

the trick is to get the installer bluray (or flashdrive), and manually run setup.exe on it from the desktop of the OS to be upgraded. Now when I tried this, I got some complicated error message that not possible. but then I thought to check for CDFS thumbdrives, and of course the MSI driver one was there. removed that, and tried again, and this time the install breezed through flawlessly, with endless reboots, no bricking up, but it literally took a few hours, where I started tidying up some of the PC work whilst waiting, and paid off my 4 credit cards online!

and I then reset default OS to win10 again, just in case. and I am writing this from the successful reinstall of win11, also the upgraded win11 is superb, with subtle colour tinting eg this screenshot, where the photo is one I took myself, where those flowers are bluebells. it is possibly doing chamaeleon tinting, that the photo has a green colour theme, and thus subtle green tinting:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/win11/tinted.jpg

where I have redacted some info!

if I run notepad that also has the tinting in the header.

anyway, the MO for creating your own bootloader, where you can load an OS on any disk from any disk, and eg put all the OSes loading from all the disks is like this:

currently just tested with the bootloaders supplied by the installers.

first you need to locate where the bootloaders are, on Linux Mint they appear as "EFI system partition" at the left of some OS disks, and are about 100MB and FAT32.

what you do is run the installer bluray, eg say for win10. you now select repair, and then you need to select the command prompt.

you now need to run a program called diskpart,

diskpart

which has its own command prompt,


and then run the command

list vol

from this you need to identify the bootloader partition from your earlier survey of the disks, and use the identifying fact that it will be about 100MB and FAT32 and labelled "hidden", also identify an unused drive letter, so for me it was the bootloader of the scratch OS installs, and was volume 8, disk letter P not used. also identify the OSes by letter, and list them in the order you want them to appear eg for me:

H: main win10
J: main win11
G: scratch win11
E: scratch win10


you then select the bootloader disk volume number, eg for me:

sel vol 8

and then assign the unused letter you found for it:

assign letter=P

if you now do

list vol

it should appear with that letter,

you now exit diskpart with the command

exit

you now change current directory to C: via:

C:

and now you do something a bit scary, you reformat the bootloader partition to FAT32 via the command:

format P: /fs:fat32

and I opted out of giving a volume label, but next time I will.

the bootloader is now erased! yippee!

you now set up the boot OSes in reverse order, via the same command with just the drive letter changing, which for my case was:

bcdboot E:Windows /s P: /f UEFI
bcdboot G:Windows /s P: /f UEFI
bcdboot J:Windows /s P: /f UEFI
bcdboot H:Windows /s P: /f UEFI

the left hand letters are the OSes to load, and the right hand letter P is the bootloader for these. you can check via tab whether there is a directory E:Windows etc,

where the last one will be the default boot, which I have deliberately selected to be the main win10. now these drive letters are just for this session, when windows boots, each OS might have totally different drive letters. you need to determine the drive letters intra-session.

and you could connect up multiple bootloaders with multiple OSes, but to avoid confusion I'd say to just target one bootloader per session otherwise chaos.

and then to reboot, set the UEFI to boot from that bootloader, and hey presto, a selection of all 4 OSes from the scratch bootloader! so I can do anything now! and of course the win11 one froze up, ie the problem wasnt the bootloader, but the legacy software had trashed something, but the 3rd installation attempt fixed the problem by upgrading in the same session, which was a really lengthy session of many hours.

and now everything is booting fine from the scratch bootloader, I havent rejigged the other bootloader, but will probably also supply all 4.

one further experiment is to install Linux Mint to the scratch disk, and see if I can load it from there. doesnt matter if it fails as I will just reformat and reconstruct it again as described above.

but anyway, this means that provided you can get the bootloader to form, you can fix it. what I havent tested is if you can construct the bootloader partition yourself, I dont see why not but it needs some experimenting, and I will probably delay. but what you could potentially do is format a disk to GPTR, and then create a FAT32 100MB partition at the start, and craft that as a bespoke bootloader via the above MO.

according to Linux Mint, that bootloader has first sector #2048, last sector #206847, and is thus 204800 sectors long, where each sector is 512 bytes.

if you replicate that geometry and use the above MO, it might work, needs testing.

then you dont need to worry about removing disks and OSes loading from the wrong disk, as you can just re-engineer the target bootloader and the wrong bootloader afterwards.

In airflow aspect it actually makes it worse, separating bottom part of the PC case from the rest. And it's main purpose is to hide the PSU and cables coming from PSU. So, you can freely remove it.

ok, its gonna get ripped out and mothballed permanently! its a right nuisance!

I, personally, don't like PSU shroud, hence why i don't have them. Only my AMD build has it, but it can't be removed. Then again, that Sharkoon PC case is one of the very few ones with green interior, which i needed for build theme.


Source: https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-a-psu-shroud/

I will remove it as soon as I have some of these other problems progressed

 

[Richard1234]

just a brief progress report that I am battling with the Linux version of the multi disk problem,

I have gotten info about reconstructing the linux menu (GRUB), which can be done, but I am not 100% sure as to what circumstances,

looks like Linux will unify bootloading to an existing Linux bootloader, and could be trickier to stop this, so maybe only install Linux to one disk.

to install to more than one disk, I am experimenting with, but it is quite time consuming as I need to backup the disk before hand in case it goes wrong, and if it does go wrong it is some hours then to reinstate the original disk.

also I am trying the Linux Mint 21.3 cinammon edge version, which has extended hardware support, but takes a long time to load, could take 15 minutes to load the test version. the installation is also very time consuming. the installed version loads quite quickly.

I have devised an MO to test out to force it to not unify loaders, I had to write some small programs to run on Linux to do this, and I need to scrutinise the programs to be sure they are correct.

the idea is that with the Linux install partition, you would backup an initial segment of the Linux install, eg probably 1MB will do. then you obliterate that segment of the partition. that hopefully will force Linux to think there isnt an installation.

then afterwards reinstate that segment from the backup.

its not a difficult problem as such, but you'd need to do it really carefully, and the program itself needs to be really correct.

it is split up into 3 steps:

1. a program to copy an initial segment of a partition, eg say 1024000 bytes to a file, say "Backup"
2. another program to rejig that file to be a repeat character, eg say 'A', to another file, say "Modified"
3. a 3rd program to copy the rejigged file to the start of the partition. this hopefully will make Linux think the disk is unidentifiable junk.

I will test this on a backed up drive,

afterwards you then use the 3rd program to reinstate "Backup".

all 3 programs are written, but not tested yet on a drive, but I have tested them on some small files and they seem alright.

you would then shut down all the earlier Linux installs, where as it might just be 1MB this should be quite fast.

you then install the next Linux, and then afterwards reinstate the 1MB on each earlier install.

there is a brute force way to do it which is to backup all the other drives, then obliterate them all, then install, then reinstate all the other drives. But I want an MO which uses minimum force. because the brute force MO could cost 6 hours per drive. whereas a minimum force MO would just cost a few minutes per drive.

at the moment I just have Linux Mint 21.3 cinammon edge installed to the disk with scratch installs, but I also installed it to a thumbdrive, and ran into problems, that it unified that to the Linux loader on the disk.

now I did backup that entire drive before doing this, and will reinstate the earlier version last thing tonight,

I am gradually building up the installations on the main win10 install, and that will be my main work system, not win11, but I will sometimes use win11.

I will delay a bit removing the PSU shroud, as I want to get this Linux problem out of the way.

ultimately it may be best to not put Linux on the same disk as Windows and to only install it on one disk.

 

[Richard1234]

progress report: the MO for Linux is working, where I forced Linux to supply a new bootloader on the same disk, and now in the UEFI there are 2 ubuntu loaders:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/linux/double_ubuntu_2024_05_23_0445.png

where I installed Linux Mint cinammon Edge to a flash drive, with its own bootloader, and no reference to any OS on any other disk. afterwards I tested, and Linux mint cinammon edge boots fine from the flashdrive, so I can use that if the system malfunctions.

the MO is to make any disk with bootloaders appear as if unallocated,

then to install Linux to a genuinely unallocated disk, and you have to firstly create an EFI system partition on the Linux install, which is a really obscure option:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/linux/efi_system_partition_option.jpg

I set that at some 100MB, to mimic what windows does.


the way I make all pre-existing bootloaders vanish is to basically backup the first 1024000 bytes of any disk which has a bootloader, and even did that with the data disk 4T M.2 drive,

this is the disk rather than a partition, the same MO could be used on a partition instead, where the partition would become unrecognisable to the system,


then I make a file of the same 1024000 size just filled with repeat characters,

and copy that to the first 1024000 bytes of the disk,

and hey presto, the partition manager shows that disk as unallocated.

also on rebooting, the UEFI has no bootloaders at all.




this requires careful notes,

then with the Linux install, you have the installer forced into a corner, and it has no option but to
do everything from the target disk.

afterwards, I checked all the other disks and they all remained apparently unallocated,

reinstated the backed up 1024000 bytes, and hey presto, the disks now all instantly populated with their original partitions,

and on rebooting, the earlier screenshot is of the various bootloaders which now all reappear including the new one for the flashdrive at the top, which just says ubuntu without any other text.

and I have now booted to the main win10 install to post this message.

on the desktop, the disks now are fully populated again with their directories and files.


now I did have backups of the 2 M.2 2T drives, just in case everything failed,
and I also copied the unreplaceable files of the 4T drive to a magnetic WD Blue 2T drive, which I left connected up during all this,

I did run into one snag when reinstating the 1024000 bytes, which is that the two 2T M.2 drives are identical.

I checked all my notes, and all concurred that Linux enumerates them as nvme0n1 is M2_2, nvme1n1 is M2_3, and nvme2n1 is M2_4, ie in numerical order, and its all functioning after that.

because of this unforeseen snag, I will modify the MO to use different repeat symbols per drive, where you need to verify you have the right repeat symbol where you dont have to rely on the drive enumeration order by Linux.

the programs in fact allow a choice of repeat hex symbol, but I will modify that a bit to give an ascii repeat symbol instead. I was using hex 41 which is 'A' as the repeat symbol.

backing up and replacing or reinstating the first 1024000 bytes is virtually instant, but you need to check and double check that you havent made any errors, and that you select the disk rather than a partition on the disk. you could work via a partition also, I cut and paste the shell history to a file just in case.

for accessing the disk bytes you need the sudo prefix, eg

sudo ./someprogram arg1 arg2 .....

anyway, this MO enables one to force Windows or Linux to install a bootloader on the same disk if its a new disk, or to unify to the existing bootloader on the same disk, without having to remove any disks, but you do need to do a survey of the disks to determine which ones have bootloaders, and to make these vanish temporarily using the MO.

next on the agenda I will see if I can photograph the machine as regards decluttering the cables.

 

[Richard1234]

In airflow aspect it actually makes it worse, separating bottom part of the PC case from the rest. And it's main purpose is to hide the PSU and cables coming from PSU. So, you can freely remove it.

I, personally, don't like PSU shroud, hence why i don't have them. Only my AMD build has it, but it can't be removed. Then again, that Sharkoon PC case is one of the very few ones with green interior, which i needed for build theme.


Source: https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-a-psu-shroud/

ok, I have finally removed it and it is "mothballed".

Spoiler: expand for clarification of the word mothballed

I dont know if people today use the word mothballed in the literal sense, but when I was a kid, people would stash things such as coats in wardrobes, and moths would start eating the clothes. People would put mothballs to deter the moths, these were white spheres maybe 13mm diameter, which you'd put in the wardrobe. the last time I saw a mothball was around 1977.

as everyone did that, the word acquired a metaphorical meaning, of when you no longer use something and preserve it in storage for the foreseeable future.

in the modern era, the clothing tends to be made of materials which dont attract moths, and people nowadays junk things they no longer use. in those days people would keep everything forever, even if things stopped functioning, this was viable as much less stuff.

anyway, I have been battling with decluttering the cables, and I have sent various ones round the other side of the mobo, in particular the 2 to the top edge of the mobo, by top I mean relative to how it is when the tower case is in use. then 2 to the right edge of the mobo, including the one with a ton of pins, and next to it a smaller one 3x2, there was a removed 1x2 which is with that bundle of cables and not attached anywhere.

that one with a ton of pins, I had to detach one of those double USB sockets, as it obstructed the grommet,


I also rerouted the PCIe cable to the graphics card, I think that is probably all, which is 5 cables, this has improved a lot the aeriel view of the mobo. but the other side of the mobo is now more cluttered, and I finally removed and mothballed the fan hub at the back.

at one point a grommet started becoming detached!

with each I made sure there was a distinct clicking sound when I reattached the cable, and for a few I detached the cable at the PSU side to disentangle from all the other cables.

reattaching cables was a bit problematic, I had to use torches to try and align the plugs, and there was a bit of guesswork. I did check the shapes of the pins!




I also removed and mothballed the PSU shroud: big improvement! its now nicer than a PC with the PSU at the top.

although its just a few cables, it was very strenuous and time consuming to do.

when I put it all back together again, and powered up the PC, this really noisy rattling sound, so I powered down the machine and did a visual, it was the power cables for the front fans running along the base fan, so I rejigged that and now its all alright.

here are some photos:

before the decluttering, the aeriel view of the mobo in the tower, with the PSU shroud in place:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/tower/before1.jpg

note the SSD which isnt in the photo Aeacus gave of the Phantek Enthoo Pro, so this must be a later revision of the product.

the other side looks like this:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/tower/before2.jpg

where the fan hub in the middle vanishes in a later photo

note on the right hand side a bit below the middle, there is an arrangement for a 3rd 2.5" SSD, but they only supply 2 caddies. you can relocate one of those 2 to that alternative area. I dont know if Phantek sell spare caddies.


after the decluttering, the aeriel view:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/tower/after1.jpg

and the view of the other side:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/tower/after2.jpg

with the fan hub removed.

I removed also one of the 2 SATA WD Blue drives, one remains in the latter photo, and have rehoused the other one in a USB3 enclosure which I bought I think on Friday.

Also I think the flash drive I was using might be defective, because if I delete all partitions on it, and then create just 2, Linux shows that as eg sdb1 and sdb5, ie it thinks there are 5 partitions, and I cannot change this.

the ubuntu loader on that flash drive eventually vanished!

I tried the ideas from the internet about re-establishing a Linux loader, and so far they dont work!
so I have given up on that idea for the moment, eventually I may try again and this time ask on a Linux forum,

I have windows loaders on hard drives under control, which is the MO mentioned earlier, where you format the EFI system partition, and then use bcdboot for each Windows install you want to load from it. where you can make Windows on any drive load from any other drive, but you need to let Windows create the initial bootloader. then you can rejig that from scratch.

I tested out Windows rejigging the bootloader created by Linux on the flash drive and fireworks!

the protocol to follow is to make sure if you want Windows on any drive, that you install Windows 10 upwards as the first thing you do with the drive. that ensures you get a proper bootloader partition which you can then rejig via the Windows shell (command prompt) of the Windows install DVD, if I remember correctly, you select repair, then click the options which lead to the words "troubleshoot", "advanced options" and "command prompt". I tried the same instructions from the desktop command prompt and Windows refuses to cooperate at some point. those same commands do work from the desktop, eg diskpart, but at some point you run out of road.


then to install left to right any further Windows installations, and you can then rejig the bootloader 100%. eg I rejigged both disks to load all 4 Windows installs from both disks. but only tested with 64 bit Windows.

I think also you can create data partitions, but it is best to create partitions consecutively left to right, where the first action is to install 64 bit Windows 10+


I will later do some further experiments to retest the MO on a higher quality flash drive.


I have now bought a vastly superior flash drive by Samsung, here is an annotated photo of the 2 drives:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/drives/flash_drives.jpg

on the upper left is the rubbish drive from a supermarket, cost some £15,

the problem is it requires some force to insert, and there is minimal surface to press against, and its worse to remove, because if in a zone with a lot of USB cables attached to neighbouring sockets, its difficult to get a grip on the item without pushing the nearby cables.

the lower right is the Samsung one, where for inserting, it has a broad flat surface to easily push against with your thumb, and for removing, it widens so you can get a good grip. this one in the photo is 256Gig, and cost £34.99, whereas the supermarket one is some 58Gig and cost some £15. bad quality and bad value for money and possibly defective.

I also bought a Toshiba 2T drive, for some £70. I scrutinised the different manufacturers and prices and capacities. going from 1T to 2T seemed a nice improvement of value, but 2T to 4T looked dubious, so decided to go for 2T. they told me they have Samsung external SSDs behind the counter. these cost I think more than double for 2T, and on enquiring about size are half the size, and a lot faster. but I decided I only need a few drives which are higher end for when travelling, this one can be low end, I think it was the cheapest USB SSD 2T in the shop. I have a 2T miniature Samsung already from 2023, called a T7, and I might shunt the data to this cheaper one, and use that one.

I want to eventually install Windows 10 to my 2023 Laptop which has Win11 pre-installed. but to install that to an external drive, and I will use the MO I have developed so it has its own loader, as the system drive of that one cannot be removed!



the 2 experiments I will try are:

to do a backup of a hard drive, then to overwrite the initial segment, and then to restore the initial segment, then to do a backup of that, and compare whether the 2 backups are byte identical.

it is supposed to be byte identical, as I swap out and then swap back in the original 1024000 bytes, to make the drive vanish and appear as if unallocated.

and then to use the earlier MO to install Linux to the Samsung flash drive.

I have refined the MO, where the initial segment, currently 1024000 bytes, is overwritten with a repeating string eg say First, where the bytes will be FirstFirstFirst.... until the end of the write buffer which currently is 65536 but you can set a custom size, where at the end of the buffer it might not be aligned eg it might end in Fi, we are only interested in the initial bytes, the rest are just junk to obliterate the proper data.

trying to align it across consecutive writes is problematic as disk writes are best kept aligned to powers of 2 which are 512 or higher, eg 1024, 2048, .... 65536, ... Disk sectors are generally 512 bytes. SSDs might not have sectors, but they will use pretend sectors to be conformant with earlier technologies.

when reverting it, the program at that point will verify the key, this is to avoid the problem of reverting to the wrong disk of 2 identical disks.

you can then verify with the example, with keys such as F, Fi, First, FirstFirstF etc. if the key is wrong, the program wont overwrite. but if the key is the empty string "" it then doesnt check for a key, this is needed for the initial write, the reverting is where you need to check the key.


you can inspect the initial bytes by using one of the programs to just read say the first 10 bytes of the disk sectors to a file, and eg check if it says FirstFirst in order to identify from some identical drives.

I panicked in case I had sent the bytes to the wrong disk, so I have reverted both disks to the last backup I did before I modified the initial segment. which does mean several hours of installing will have to be done again for win11 and the 2 scratch OSes, but I will try to do these whilst doing non computing stuff. eg start a time consuming install just before going shopping.

once I verify the MO is byte perfect, I will try to install Linux to the Samsung flash drive in the photo with its own bootloader. and then see if the ubuntu loader doesnt vanish.

I'll try to make the programs available for free, but I need to create some documentation.

there are 3 programs, each of which are very straightforward, the one copies an initial segment of a disk or partition to a file, the second just obliterates a file with a key, and the 3rd copies a file to the initial segment of a disk or partition.

so all you do is:
1. copy initial segment of disk to a file
2. create a new file which is an obliteration of the first file
3. copy the obliterated file to the initial segment of the disk

the disk now vanishes and both Linux and Windows will depict the disk as unallocated

you now install Windows to another disk, and wont get interference from the obliterated disk's loader,

then afterwards you merely copy the original initial segment file back to the start of the disk,

and now all the partitions, files, directories instantly reappear both on Windows and Linux.


I checked Linuxes dd program, and it cannot be used for this, as it doesnt deal with subsets, the stuff after the written subset is problematic. it only works properly for the entire disk or partition, not for subsets.

to change a subset of a file, you need to access the file with a special mode, dd is ok if you access the entire disk or partition, but that is no use to me as it takes maybe 3 hours to do that. instead I just need say the first 1024000 bytes, even the first 102400 may be sufficient.

normally programs either create a brand new file, or overwrite an existing file, or they append to an existing file. but I need a more obscure MO which is where you only overwrite a subset.

eg just overwrite the 5 bytes starting at the 12345th byte of a file with the characters "hello" the bytes before the h and after the o must be unchanged.

I will also have a go eventually at installing Windows to the Samsung flash drive with its own bootloader.

 

[Aeacus]

I also removed and mothballed the PSU shroud: big improvement! its now nicer than a PC with the PSU at the top.

although its just a few cables, it was very strenuous and time consuming to do.

when I put it all back together again, and powered up the PC, this really noisy rattling sound, so I powered down the machine and did a visual, it was the power cables for the front fans running along the base fan, so I rejigged that and now its all alright.

For one, your PC now looks far better, with good cable management done.

Also, i can see from the pics, that you now have easier access to the ports on MoBo, both from the front and also easier access to 3.5" HDDs from the back, since cables are moved aside, behind MoBo tray, where they are supposed to be (away from everything else). Also, airflow is now better as well. No more blocking of front/bottom intake fans and CPU cooler also has more free air to pull in.

So, overall, while it took long time, are you pleased with the result?

And i too think that PC looks much better without PSU shroud. Nice to see the Seasonic PRIME in there.

Oh, if you already didn't know, there are brackets out there where you can convert the 5.25" bay to hold either 1x 3.5" HDD or 2x 2.5" SSDs. So, when you need to add more drives and ran out of the 3.5" HDD cages (since after all, 6x slots total in them), you can chuck some into 5.25" bay.

note on the right hand side a bit below the middle, there is an arrangement for a 3rd 2.5" SSD, but they only supply 2 caddies. you can relocate one of those 2 to that alternative area. I dont know if Phantek sell spare caddies.

Phanteks does list the 2.5" SSD bracket on their website as well. Phanteks PH-SDBKT,
specs: https://phanteks.com/PH-SDBKT.html

So, you would need two of those, if you want to mount 2.5" SSDs at the back of the MoBo tray.

Did find it on sale on amazon, link: https://www.amazon.com/Phanteks-Bracket-Single-Enthoo-PH-SDBKT_01/dp/B00M0R6IFW

There are two sizes of it. One that holds one 2.5" SSD and another one that holds two 2.5" SSDs. Now, i don't know, height wise, if you can fit the SSD bracket that holds two 2.5" SSDs. You need to measure it. E.g stack two 2.5" SSDs ontop of each other and look if you have enough space to close the side panels.

 

[Richard1234]

For one, your PC now looks far better, with good cable management done.

Also, i can see from the pics, that you now have easier access to the ports on MoBo, both from the front and also easier access to 3.5" HDDs from the back, since cables are moved aside, behind MoBo tray, where they are supposed to be (away from everything else). Also, airflow is now better as well. No more blocking of front/bottom intake fans and CPU cooler also has more free air to pull in.

ok, I hadnt thought about the airflow aspect, removing the shroud also should majorly improve the flow from the base of the tower.

one cable I didnt reroute is the SATA power cables, as I have SATA on both sides of the mobo, namely the 2 SDD cages at the door side of the tower, and then the 3.5" cages, also the optical drive, although after getting the external optical drive I disconnected the internal optical drive. it is installed but disconnected:

I think optical drives burden the booting of a machine, so it is best to only have them connected when you actually use them, and also to make them last longer. unused optical drives also waste drive letters, which for me is a problem as I often have used up all 26 letters, and have to swap letters to access all partitions!

right now I have 11 letters used up, one of which is the optical drive. D, I, J, H are the partitions of the SSD in those photos, the 4T is E, the scratch installs of Windows 10 and 11 are F and G,
the main installs are C and K, the main flashdrive is M and the optical drive is L.

this is where I think external USB3 optical drives are better, AND you can reconnect the same one to different machines. I only sometimes use optical drives, namely:

1. windows and Linux installers, via BDRs as these are much faster than DVDs. win11 wont fit on a normal DVD but possibly fits on a double layer one.

2. for long term archiving of less used stuff,

Spoiler: expand for off topic examples

eg sometimes if I do a major new journey with the car, I save the dashcam footage of the entire journey for future reference. eg I visited a place near Birmingham, where the first journey was through the countryside, but 2nd journey was through Birmingham and I got fined something like 60 for driving my diesel car in the clean air zone there and not paying as I was waiting for them to send me a bill the way London does! so with dashcam footage I can study how to avoid driving into the city, the footage gives North South East West coordinates for each video frame. blurays are the best way to store this kind of stuff.

another example: the satnav once sent me on this really scenic journey from one part of Bristol to another. some years later I wanted to do the journey again, but all I could remember was the start and end point. so I drove to the start point, and put the end point in the satnav, but this time a totally different uninteresting journey! that earlier one was because of roadwork diversions! luckily I had saved the dashcam footage, and from a few hours of study of the video compass coordinates and Google Earth I repeated the journey from memory of the Google Earth views!

3. for purchased installs, eg I nearly fully filled a bluray with the installs for the Cyberlink and Corel Roxio bluray burning software and further software. because the purchased downloads are to internal drives.

So, overall, while it took long time, are you pleased with the result?

yes, its definitely better!

I hadnt done it originally not because of laziness but I wasnt aware of the idea!

I thought the grommets might be for liquid cooling of the machine!

And i too think that PC looks much better without PSU shroud. Nice to see the Seasonic PRIME in there.

that shroud also makes the already heavy PC even heavier, I weighed the shroud just now and it is 507 grams, and removing and reattaching slows down accessing the cables, reattaching in particular is tricky as you have to raise the shroud a bit to align the 3 thumbscrews.

the shroud also obstructs airflow!

Oh, if you already didn't know, there are brackets out there where you can convert the 5.25" bay to hold either 1x 3.5" HDD or 2x 2.5" SSDs. So, when you need to add more drives and ran out of the 3.5" HDD cages (since after all, 6x slots total in them), you can chuck some into 5.25" bay.

can you give any purchase links for future reference?

Phanteks does list the 2.5" SSD bracket on their website as well. Phanteks PH-SDBKT,
specs: https://phanteks.com/PH-SDBKT.html

So, you would need two of those, if you want to mount 2.5" SSDs at the back of the MoBo tray.

Did find it on sale on amazon, link: https://www.amazon.com/Phanteks-Bracket-Single-Enthoo-PH-SDBKT_01/dp/B00M0R6IFW

There are two sizes of it. One that holds one 2.5" SSD and another one that holds two 2.5" SSDs. Now, i don't know, height wise, if you can fit the SSD bracket that holds two 2.5" SSDs. You need to measure it. E.g stack two 2.5" SSDs ontop of each other and look if you have enough space to close the side panels.

measuring, the plane the cage is to be at is 2.5cm from the lid cover, and the attachment is maybe 0.5cm elevated, the purchase URL for the double decker one says 2.54cm, but that probably includes the ridge going in the other direction, and the tower lid cover is flexible so can bulge a bit, so I think it will fit.

the 2 bays at the front are on a plane with 3.5cm leeway, so that means one could have 6 SSDs in total!

but the catch is you would use up all the SATA sockets! unless there is a way to buy further SATA sockets?

on other matters, I did test the overwriting of the initial approx 1MB of a hard disk, then reverting this, and comparing before and after, and they were byte identical. the experiment costs some 6 hours, in fact before and after I did a compressed sector backup, and compared the compressed gzip files, and these were byte identical.

now if they werent identical, the underlying bytes potentially might be identical, as some compression systems allow compression ratio versus speed choices, eg smaller + slower, or bigger + faster compression.

so if they werent identical, I would have expanded both, and then compared, but this leads to a problem that I would need two 4T disks, but I could also compare the previous copy with the disk itself, or reconfigured the 4T disk to use transparent compression where 2 x 2T probably will fit easily on 4T. eg the gzip compression of the 2T drive is 121.78GB. so I could fit some 30 such 2T disks on the 4T disk! ALSO interestingly, doing a compressed backup is hours faster than doing uncompressed! so a disk with compression is potentially faster and bigger than uncompressed, but it does depend on the compression software. its a question of whether compression latency is better than disk access latency. the compression here results in 15x less disk access. but these disks are relatively unpopulated, needs experimenting with heavily populated disks. the uncompressed backup has to write 2T to disk, even if only 1 byte was used!

I noticed that with the compressed backups, the compressed file bytesize would sometimes remain unchanged for ages, could be more than an hour! this must be because a huge zone is just repeat bytes.

Now if you had some identical disks, and also wanted to install to a further identical disk, this leads to a problem of how to identify the target disk at the installer, might not be feasible. as the identification MO is done where you have access to a shell, not sure if I can use the Linux shell during a Linux install, with a Windows install I think shift-F10 procures a shell, but my programs are Linux only, would be major work figuring out how to do Windows versions! unless the Windows shell (command prompt) has a command for a disk ID number.

for this circumstance, the MO can be used on partitions instead of disks,

eg with various Linuxes for non M.2 disks, you'd give the disk as say /dev/sdc but the partitions of the same disk are given as /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdc2, /dev/sdc3, .... where the partitions are numbered left to right, you'd use GParted to determine the name of the target partition,

the hard disks and flash drives are sda, sdb, sdc, sdd, ....

M.2 disks are the same general idea, but a bit more complicated, an M.2 disk is eg /dev/nvme2n1
and the partitions are /dev/nvme2n1p1 , /dev/nvme2n1p2, etc, where there is a bigger risk of making a mistake. so I literally triple check with GParted before pressing return.

on Linux Mint, my 3 M.2 disks are nvme0n1, nvme1n1, nvme2n1, with the partitions labelled with suffices p1, p2, p3, etc,
ALSO the partition numbering is DIFFERENT from Windows numbering, where Windows will declare a different number of partitions from Linux.

Linux Mint Cinammon Edge also names drives a bit differently from Linux Mint MATE, and the try without installing also is different, and Ubuntu different again, oem instal before shipping different again,

where it is I think /media/oem/Somedisk,

whereas the try without installing I think is eg /media/mint/Somedisk and once installed it is
/media/username/Somedisk

from some ancient notes I think Ubuntu's naming is /media/Somedisk

so you have to run GParted to find out the local naming system, dont assume anything and re-establish per session.

for camouflaging partitions instead of disks, its the same programs and same MO, in fact I used a similar idea with my earlier MO, but the new MO is better as at the end the disk is byte identical to before. the earlier MO was to backup the EFI system partition, then reformat it say to NTFS, and now Windows will decide there is no bootloader. afterwards to reinstate the backup. but I did notice that the disk name and flags had changed, where I manually reverted these, namely EFI system partition for the name, and boot,esp for the flags. (esp = EFI system partition).

but Windows was quite happy with this, and the earlier bootloaders all fine.

if instead you backup and then obliterate enough bytes of a partition, Windows and Linux will decide the partition is an unrecognised filesystem, and will regard there as being no bootloader so will create a new bootloader on the same disk as the OS install.

Windows and Linux wont modify a user created partition unless you select an option such as "this install will erase earlier stuff", but they will modify automatically generated system partitions, eg with the 2 scratch installs, I designated exactly 310.5GB for each, but the first one in fact got 309.85GB, and the deficit was used to create some system partitions, Windows and Linux might modify those unpredictably. you can stop this by obliterating an initial segment of these partitions. but I have only tested this on the EFI system partition.

the 2nd install got exactly 310.5GB as requested.


afterwards to reinstate the bytes from the backup.

the advantage of this MO, is all the original partitions will be there, which helps to identify which disk you are at, the disadvantage is for Linux you might need to camouflage more than 1 partition so it could be slower.

I will have to experiment with this later on in time, where I need to do a backup of the entire disk first, in case the experiment fails!

my general MO involves using both Windows and Linux, if you refuse to use Linux then I cannot help you!
I am sure it is possible to go entirely via Windows, but I would have to invest time finding out how to do this, and no point as I can deal with the Windows side using Linux.

right now I noticed that a lot of websites are loading very slowly, so have finally reinstalled Norton, I have a 5 device subscription, and noticed it has an option to transfer a subscription to a new device.

doing a proper install of the Amiga emulator also is on the agenda. I installed it on the win 10 install further back in time, but the graphics resolutions were unsatisfactory.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

And when, exactly, do you intend to actually USE this PC rather than just futz around with performance tests and continuous questions?

This thread alone has now stretched to 17 pages since February and shows no signs of ending.

 

[Ralston18]

To all:

Seems to me that right now is a good time to end/close this thread.

Then OP (Richard1234) can create a new post with respect to a specific problem that needs to be addressed in the future.

Open the new post with the required hardware specs, OS information, and a specific statement regarding the problem in question.

Objective being that anyone wishing to respond to the new cited problem will not need to read through the preceding posts.

Clean slate approach.