February 28, 20215 yr Commercial Member We've got a bit of a delay on the patch. My development PC threw its toys out of the pram and refused to boot with a 'no boot manager found' error message. Turned out the boot SSD had lost its MBR (master boot record), forcing me into all sorts of rebuilds and updates I had no intention of doing. No loss of data; I'm utterly paranoid about losing data so backups are spread across two PCs and eight (yes!) hard drives. Then to add insult to injury, when I'd got some stability back in the PC, P3D wouldn't licence itself. It threw up a nice little error message about a failed uninstall and I needed to contact Lockheed Martin, so... I'm waiting to hear back from them. Most of you will have fallen foul of the diagnostics problem. With a PC, when something fails the only way to fully diagnose the failing item is to buy a new one. Or a new whatever might have caused the failing item to die. That gets... very expensive, very quickly. I'd thrown in an old 2Tb Seagate HDD to try and get a boot but that didn't work. The O/S did a corrupt install and the usual trick of 'sfc /scannow' didn't work because the backup files in the O/S virtual store were corrupted too. So I tried an older, smaller SSD just to try and get this PC up and running so I could try and diagnose the source of the problem. The O/S installed cleanly this time but it was unstable, failing to boot to fail around 70% of the time. I ended up buying a new SSD, new motherboard, new graphics card and a new power supply because I couldn't say with any certainty which one was causing the trouble. A new graphics card because the processor is an i5-8800KF where KF signifies no onboard graphics. In the end I didn't need any of them... grrrrrrrrrr. The day they arrived, the PC booted first time. And has continued to boot on demand, every time. And has been stable from that day last week to this. And has finally let me get all my development software reinstalled. So there's a pile of expensive unopened boxes in the corner that cost a lot of money. The only graphics card I could get my hands on was a Palit RTX2080Ti Gaming Pro OC because nothing else was available from any of the trustworthy UK suppliers. If you want a heart attack, go look up the price of one of those. That is, if you can find one. That's why I sometimes hate computers. Edited February 28, 20215 yr by dragonflightdesign
February 28, 20215 yr 20 minutes ago, dragonflightdesign said: That's why I sometimes hate computers. Only sometimes? You have it good! The World is divided into two groups. Those who say "Give me a link" and those that provide the link. WWG1WGA
February 28, 20215 yr Author Commercial Member My piggy bank hates me too because it's discovered that I put it on a diet that it didn't need.
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