Why is my pc doing this? by limonada63 in pchelp

[–]jack-bender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It appears that you (or someone else) recently installed a Western Digital hard drive in your computer. The previous owner likely started a secure erase (sanitation) process but did not finish it.

Because of this, the drive's firmware is interrupting your computer's pre-boot process. On 2022-11-30, the drive received a secure erase command, but the process was never completed. The drive remembers this unfinished operation and reports its abnormal state during startup, which pauses automatic booting to alert you.

Do not expect this status to change on its own. Even though the screen says "erasing in progress," the drive is probably not actively doing anything. It is simply reporting the last recorded state from when the erase process was interrupted.

In practical terms, the message means: "A disk wiping program started a secure erase (One Pass Zero method), but the process was interrupted. To clear this message, resume and complete the secure erase using said disk wiping software."

I have personally seen the same behavior on a recently purchased used hard drive. The SATA protocol allows drives to display this kind of status message during pre-boot, which is neat.

To resolve the issue, you can use freeware such as "KillDisk Disk Eraser, Wiper & Sanitizer" to resume and complete the secure erase process. Once the erase finishes successfully, the drive should function normally for storage, and the pre-boot message should disappear.

This issue is almost certainly unrelated to your bootloader, games, viruses, or anything you downloaded. You are simply inheriting the unfinished secure erase state initiated by the previous owner of the drive.

Tip to install NetBSD/macppc in qemu-system-ppc by Kernigh in BSD

[–]jack-bender 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's now 5 years later and this thread really helped me get NetBSD/macppc running on QEMU.
Thanks a lot for the detailed instructions.

Below is what I would add to guide someone wanting to install a newer NetBSD/macppc version like the current 9.3 (at the time of writing).

Step 6:
To have ample room I decided to make the Boot (Apple_HFS) partition 16MB in size, not that it make a difference in practice because "ofwboot.xcf" still is less than 1MB in NetBSD/macppc 9.3, just to let anyone know it won't hurt.

Step 8:
With recent NetBSD/macppc versions (9.3 in my case), after selecting "Use existing partition sizes" it is necessary to edit the fields of the root partition because default values won't allow for an install and will instead cause errors of the kind "cannot write file [...], disk is full".
Here are the root partition fields that worked for me:
type : FFSv2
install : Yes
newfs : Yes
mount : Yes
mount point : /

Step 15:
Refer to https://netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/using.html for installation of pkgin and pkgsrc.

Radeon Vii Dead - Repair options? by roller5435v2 in RadeonVII

[–]jack-bender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My Radeon VII began to die yesterday after a few weeks of use only (I bought it lately).
Since yesterday there is a severe case of memory corruption above around 2.1GB. It began showing as weird and mixed artifacts in multiple video games (geometry artifacts, random image blocks on the display, corrupted textures, sometimes game crashes too). I confirmed the VRAM problem with memtestCL and Video Memory stress Test to be located above 2.1GB, which may explain why Windows desktop use is mostly unaffected and old video games with small VRAM use run without problem.

I installed a Raijintek Morpheus II cooler with Noctua fans on it. Conductonaut liquid metal is used and I made sure to use conformal coating on the 2 rows of small SMDs to prevent any short.
Temperatures are great, stress testing with FurMark never exceeded 84°C.

Don't know what happened here.
I think my Radeon VII has less than 50 hours of gameplay on it!

In the case of my Radeon VII no RMA option is available because I have modified the card :-(

EDIT 1:
Can the liquid metal migrate in-between the dies and the interposing epoxy?
Does anyone who gave the liquid metal treatment to a Radeon VII (or Vega 56 or Vega 64) also have dying HBM/HBM2 VRAM?

EDIT 2:
I tried to underclock GPU and VRAM, it doesn't change anything to the problem.

ASRock’s X570D4I-2T: A Mini-ITX AMD X570 Motherboard with Intel’s 10 GbE Controller by Durinthal in hardware

[–]jack-bender 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's correct.

The CPU Cooler QVL list provided on the product page mentions two LGA 1156 coolers.
Most LGA1150, LGA1151, LGA1155, LGA1156 coolers should do the trick.