Adam Hinz: The Blog
I got 64-bit problems but a bitch ain't one
On 2007-12-08 at 12/08/2007 08:56:00 PM...
I just built a new computer. My old one was, well, getting old, and I need a new project to work on. I ordered everything off of newegg.com (I'm reusing my hard drives, monitor, and wireless card). Here's a quick rundown of the setup:
Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB RAM
ASUS P5N-E SLI Motherboard
Nvidia 512 MB something-or-other
black case with a bug honkin' fan
First things first, I had to backup my main hard drive. I've done this a couple times in the past, and luckily I've adopted the habit of saving everything personal in My Documents. That helped. Using my old hard drive, I was able to boot into Ubuntu (but not XP), and backup worked fine after remounting my hard drives.
Next I restarted and popped in my XP cd. It installed no problem, but when I tried installing my Dlink 520e wireless card, it complained about a memory conflict. My best guess was that with 2 GB of ram and 512 MB memory card, XP might be having trouble allocating memory address to everything. The only thing I knew to do was try out some 64 bit operating systems.
Lucky for me, IU's CS department has an awesome deal with Microsoft that lets me download tons of software for free. It's called the MSDN Academic Alliance, and through that I downloaded XP 64-bit version.
I burnt it to a cd and booted up, but I ran into another problem. When the XP installer tried to format my hard drive, it game me this error:
Setup Cannot Format the Partition
Your computer may not have enough memory to examine the drives, or your windows CD may contain some corrupted files.
Well crap. About an hour of Googling found me this site:
http://www.planetamd64.com/index.php?showtopic=8567
Apparantely this cd doesn't always work on CD-RW drives, but it will work fine in DVD drives. I popped the cd in my DVD-RW drive, changed my boot order, and lo-and-behold it worked.
Install went fine, and soon enough I was running XP x64. I ran into some problems with the cd my motherboard came with. The autorun program would crash when I ran it. Instead, I browsed the cd and ran the installers manually.
Next I tried installing my Dlink wireless card. The installer ran fine, but the drivers did not work. Turns out this card is just old enough for Dlink to not care about writing 64 bit drivers for. Seems my only solution was to buy a new wireless card (no reason to go back to 32 bit now because I'll probably run into the same problem).
I ran to Best Buy after watching IU kill Kentucky. I found on Best Buy's website a Dlink card that definitely had 64 bit drivers (and worked automatically in Ubuntu!), but of course the store did not have it in stock. I took a gamble on the cheapest Netgear ($45) and ran home. Just my luck, Netgear doesn't like 64 bit either. Lucky for me, planetamd64.com came through again:
http://www.planetamd64.com/lofiversion/index.php?t28765.html
Turns out the chip manufacturer for Netgear is nicer than Netgear, and after downloading this driver, it worked just fine:
1. Go to:
http://www.skd.de/e_en/support/driver_searchresults.html?navanchor=&term=typ.treiber+produkt.SK-54C1&produkt=produkt.SK-54C1&typ=typ.treiber&system=
2. Click on "Download" for "SK-54C1 Windows XP and 2000 x64 driver".
3. Accept, download, extract.
4. Install Driver.
5. "Continue Anyways"
6. It Works!
With wireless, I can finally start downloading Windows updates. I'm currently grabbing SP2 (I downloaded it on my laptop while running other updates, because I'm fast like that).
This is more of a note to myself, because I will likely have to do this again some time in the future. Let me know if any of this info was helpful.
After XP is fine and happy, I'll start working on Ubuntu (64-bit baby!)