windows
Windows 7 Upgrade – ATI Driver issue
I just spent the better half of the day upgrading my son’s Dell 1721 laptop from Vista to Windows 7. I have done my share of Linux installs and upgrades on all kinds of hardware configurations but this was one of the toughest I have ever been through. Once I resolved it, the fix is rather easy, but finding the fix was a challenge. I am thankful for the many people who post useful information in forums so that people like me can resolve our problems. Hopefully this post will help some folks and save them a great deal of time and frustration.
The Problem
When upgrading from Vista to Windows 7, I received an error message that I needed to update my driver for my ATI AHCI Raid controller. So I went to the device manager and clicked on upgrade driver. Windows told me that it was up to date already. Keep in mind that the install process would run for 15-20 minutes each time before it would tell me what the issue was (grrrrr). I had a number of other issues reported initially which required me to uninstall certain software modules. Each time I complied, the install process would run for another 15-20 minutes to tell me about the next problem. When I finally got to the driver problem, I was stuck. No matter what I tried I could not update the driver. I finally found a discussion thread in a forum that led me to the solution. It is a long back and forth thread so I will spare you the details, instead I will show you how to resolve the issue below.
The Solution
The way to resolve the driver issue is to manually copy the new driver over the old driver in the appropriate folder and DO NOT REBOOT! Rebooting was the culprit which for some reason would bring back the old .sys file. So here are the steps.
- Download the RAID Driver here. Make sure you download the RAID driver and not one of the other drivers.
- Run the setup program for the RAID driver (9-12_win7_32-64_raid.exe)
- Locate the driver (.sys file) by going here ->C:\ATI\Support\9-12_vista32-64_raid\Packages\Drivers\SBDrv\SB7xx\RAID\LH
- Copy the driver (ahcix86s.sys)
- Go to C:\windows\system32\drivers and backup the driver ahcix86s.sys (likely has a 2007 date)
- Paste new driver (ahcix86s) into this folder (should now have a 2009 date)
- DO NOT REBOOT
- Run Windows 7 installer
That’s it! It took me several hours to find all of this information and successfully implement this solution. I hope this helps somebody and saves several hours.
One last note: For all you Microsoft fanboys who bash Linux, this Windows 7 upgrade was a complete pain in the ass and was much harder than most Linux installs I have ever worked on. I even had to recover a Mac once and found it easier to resolve than this. Anyhow, good luck to those who are reading this and looking for a solution!
UPDATE:
After following the steps above, the Windows 7 upgrade went through its process. It requires a reboot several times. For some reason I kept getting an error that it could not find a rebootable partition. So every time it rebooted I had to press F12 and tell it to boot from the RAID drive. Then it would continue the upgrade process. I do not know if this issue is related to any of the steps above.
UPDATE 2:
The “no rebootable partition” issue was caused by the fact that I left a thumb drive in a USB port which I used to back up some of my files. It was not related to any of the above mentioned steps!
Linux – not just a Windows killer
One of the most popular discussions in the blogosphere is the topic of how Linux is posed to start taking market share from Microsoft in the battle of the desktops. What I don’t see being discussed too much anymore is how dominating Linux is becoming in the middle tier and backend server space. Not only has Linux been killing Windows in this area but it is also killing mainframes, Unix, and is a favorite choice for grid computing.
Grid computing is an area where Linux makes the most sense to me. Companies like Google and Paypal are clustering thousands of cheap nodes or blades without having to pay a few hundred bucks per node or processor in operating system licensing fees. These companies are also taking advantage of the available source code and making tweaks to customize performance and security to meet their needs. Check out this article about how Paypal leveraged 4000 Linux nodes running RedHat and eliminated the need for an expensive mainframe. Here is a key quote from this article…
In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% “is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In [PayPal's] world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions.
I can personally speak to a real life business case for Linux. About eight years ago I worked on a project that had incredible data processing requirements. At that time, the only database technology that existed in the market place that even had the potential to meet our performance requirements was Teradata. They gave us a quote of $34M for the solution which was comprised of proprietary hardware and software. Back then, our entire IT budget was less then $34M. So we built our own solution which ran on a cluster of servers running Red Hat Linux for $100K. Throw in our labor and other fees and we spent close to $1M. What is more amazing is that we did not add a single employee to the staff to run the system since the system is self monitoring and self healing. With the Taradata solution we would have had to add DBA resources. This system is still running today and provides services for a product that generates over $100M a year.
I also stumbled across another article where IT shops are moving off of Unix to Linux for cost savings. A key take away from this article is this quote…
Linux is the best-engineered, most interoperable platform for enterprise computing and is becoming the clear choice for organisations.
So we can debate all day whether Linux is the real deal on the desktop, but in the server world, Linux is king. The irony to me is eight years ago when I was proposing Linux servers (before Linux was cool!), I was getting the same push back and resentment that Linux on the desktop is receiving today. I am sure that three or four years from now I can dig out this post and joke about how people used to fight Linux on the desktop.
Dumping Vista – A divorce with a happy ending
I have many colleagues and friends who have been through messy divorces. In each case, these poor guys have gone from having the good life, to having issues, to losing half of their assets (or more). I just filed my divorce papers for Microsoft’s
With all jokes aside, I recently posted my positive experience of installing Kubuntu on an old 1.7GHz machine that was taking 10 minutes to boot up XP. The registry was beyond repair and the various programs like Spybot, Adaware, PitStop, Defrag, and many others did little to improve performance. The desktop was destined for the dumpster. Enter Kubuntu and this PC now works like a champ. I installed Wine on it and got IE 6.0 running on it for those foolish websites that target only the Microsoft browser. My daughter plays various Flash enabled games on Club Penguin. On my brand new Dell Inspiron 1721 laptop running
So I installed Mepis 64 bit on my laptop and wiped out Vista. My daughter launched her game and it loaded instantly. Her exact words were, “Wow, this is so fast”. My response was “Good Bye Vista!”. So let’s take the religion out of this discussion and talk about the investment I just made on my hardware. I bought two brand new identical laptops for $1000 each. These laptops have a Dual-core 64 bit processor with a Gig of memory. Now the Microsoft fanatics would cry, “why would you buy a laptop with only a Gig of memory?” My answer is, my budget doesn’t allow for laptops that cost $2K-$3K and the main usage of these laptops are web browsing, email, and word processing. None of those functions require a ton of computer resources. I also have a monster machine (Dell XPS gaming machine) for all of our intense gaming needs (Battlefield 2, Civilization IV, Age of Empires, etc.). So two laptops for $2000 dollars was what I was willing to spend. Unfortunately, Dell did not offer XP or Linux on these machines. The cost of Vista is about $300. So 30% of the cost of my laptops was for an operating system that drained 50% of my resources and performed poorly.
I am not a financial analyst, but that is not a good spend of money. Now that I have eliminated Vista from the equation, I get a better ROI on my investment, even after acknowledging that I threw away $300 worth of software. As I mentioned in a post called Vista – What were they thinking, my wife dislikes Vista so much that she refuses to use the new laptop that I bought her for her birthday (due to it’s poor performance). Now she is happy with the laptop running Mepis and the old clunker running Kubuntu.
My plan now is to move all of our computers except the gaming machine to Linux. The gaming machine will stay on XP while the laptops will leverage Wine and virtual machines for those Windows centric programs that won’t run on Linux. I will install various Linux distributions and allow for the user to select from a list of distributions when booting the system. Eventually we will probably settle on a distribution like Kubuntu of Freespire that has an interface similar to Windows for an easy transition.
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| From Kubuntu |
So for all of the folks out there who have gone through a messy divorce, divorcing your Vista operating system is the only divorce in town where you get your assets back and still get to keep your kids!
Tighter budgets mean more Open Source
I just read two really interesting articles (Giving proprietary vendors a run for their money & Could Linux become the dominant OS?). These articles and a discussion I had yesterday about budget constraints for the next calendar year makes me think that Open Source Software (OSS) is on the verge of becoming mainstream over the next few years. I have already seen the statistics where 51% of companies are using OSS in mission critical applications. This is starting to look very similar to the days where everyone was fleeing the mainframe for client server technology. The client server craze was driven by lower cost and greater flexibility. Does that sound familiar?
Back to my budget discussion. I was having a discussion with a peer about budget constraints for the upcoming year. Our budgets typically remain flat or slightly increase each year. But each year the cost of doing business rises so we really have less to work with. We have been leveraging newer technologies, like virtualization, disk consolidation and compression, and others that have been driving costs down. Over the past few years we have been dealing with our budget constraints through technology improvements in the hardware area. Now its time to look at software.
As I look at the back end servers, I can’t see how we can continue to justify spending the money on licenses and maintenance for proprietary operating systems like AIX or SCO or Windows 2003 unless the applications we are serving up mandate them. For example, we obviously need a Windows server to run Exchange, but many third party packages we buy give us the option of Windows or Linux. For those worried about support for OSS, read this article about open source service providers. With the advancements in virtualization, I should be able to create as many test and development environments I need as long as I don’t have to continue paying for the OS licenses. Linux gives me that flexibility. I think a good strategy this year is to look at all of your software assets to see if there are candidates to move off of proprietary solutions to open source solutions. Once you have identified the candidates, put a plan together for replacing these systems over time.
Then I started looking further down the road. I have written many articles about my concerns with Vista and how this might be the right time to start a Linux on the desktop pilot. With the potential of Linux on the desktop being introduced to the enterprise over the next few years, coupled with applications moving towards SaaS models and rich AJAX enabled interfaces, does it still make sense to leverage .Net technologies and force the .Net framework and ActiveX controls on clients? If it makes sense to reduce licensing costs at the middle tier, Java, Ruby, or LAMP technologies sure look like better solutions.
So as I look down the road and see a continuous push to reduce costs while increasing value, I wonder how much proprietary software companies will be purchasing 5-10 years from now. Will it be like the mainframe where the only systems left standing are the ones that have no cost justification to replace? Will the norm be that new applications move to OSS? I know we are still a few years away from this but OSS is becoming more mainstream and widely acceptable in corporate IT whether we want to admit it or not.
Eating my own dog food
After writing an article that discussed embracing open source, one of my colleagues entered my office and gave me the “Eat your own Dog Food” speech. So he downloaded Ubuntu Desktop
for me using BitTorrent and burned me a CD. The install was simple and I was up an running in minutes. I have been running without one piece of Microsoft software on my laptop for three weeks now and I am loving it. Free at last, Free at last!
There are some challenges though. Open Office is a great replacement for Microsoft Office but I can’t find a replacement to read existing Visio diagrams. Today I received an MS Project file that I couldn’t open. I am sure if I search the net I can find an open source tool to do the job. I also had a problem with my printer driver which took some time to resolve. Thunderbird is a great email client but it doesn’t have hooks into my Outlook Calendar so I can’t use it for my corporate mail. I am using Evolution which is only marginal. When time allows I will test out Sunbird and Lightning.
But with all of that aside, I no longer wait for 5-10 minutes for my laptop to boot up. I don’t wait forever for Outlook to come up in the mornings, and I don’t get any system crashes. The blue screen of death is a distant memory and the daily reboot routine is no longer required. There are no stupid paper clips popping up asking me if I am sure that I know what I am doing.
I am sure my freedom will end when somebody in desktop services realizes that all of their Big Brother software is not being run on my laptop. I will enjoy the ride while it lasts.
I know the majority of the corporate world isn’t quite ready to replace their Windows desktops with Linux yet, but I can tell you from my experience that Ubuntu is ready for prime time.
Security Report: Windows vs Linux
Many of the folks I know who have issues with Linux, lean on unproven myths and perceptions to prove their point. I prefer to back arguments with research and real data. In doing so I stumbled across a well-researched article that answers many questions about the Windows vs. Linux security debate. It is a rather long article so I’ll highlight a few sentences out of it.
While discussing the myth, “Windows only suffers so many attacks because there are more Windows installations than Linux, therefore Linux would be just as vulnerable if it had as many installations”, the article states:
...according to Netcraft, 47 of the top 50 web sites with the longest running uptime (times between reboots) run Apache. None of the top 50 web sites runs Windows or Microsoft IIS. So if it is true that malicious hackers attack the most numerous software platforms, that raises the question as to why hackers are so successful at breaking into the most popular desktop software and operating system, infect 300,000 IIS servers, but are unable to do similar damage to the most popular web server and its operating systems?
Malicious software is so rampant that the average time it takes for an unpatched Windows XP to be compromised after connecting it directly to the Internet is 16 minutes — less time than it takes to download and install the patches that would help protect that PC.
While discussing the myth, “Open source is inherently dangerous because the code is readily available”, the article states:
Windows Server 2003 has experienced the most severe security holes. Microsoft’s own classification of the flaws shows that 38% of the patched programs are rated as Critical. If we apply the metrics outlined in the previous sections, we would have to raise that to between 40-50%…..In sharp contrast, of the 40 vulnerabilities listed by Red Hat, only 4 are rated as Critical by our metrics (Red Hat does not list a severity rank for its alerts). That means 10% of the most recent 40 updates are of Critical severity.
There is a lot more good information in this article so feel free to read more…
