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Laptop woes

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
Oh wow, that are a lot of terrible things. It'll take a while before it all settles I think. I saw you wanted to try texturing. Maybe I can tutor you a bit to help your sales?
I would love that - though right now I have a few obstacles - I am still trying to clean and repair my Father's house and make room to set up a proper work area. While I have my old workstation sort of set up, it is on a typing table at the foot of my bed with barely room for the mousepad and keyboard. This past couple of years in the wake of my father's passing has been hectic on me...and though I am close to the other side of it now, there is still so much to do, and when life keeps throwing me these other situations to eat up my time and distract me it just drags it all out.

I am willing to learn though. I have dabbled with texturing an making image maps in Photoshop and GiMPShop. I am trying to get a better handle on unwrapping and remaking UVs - for that I have Lightwave, Wings, or Blender (Wings UV system seems the most user friendly) and I have UV Mapper but not the pro version.
 

Aylaaenas_Evenwing

Adventurous
I would love that - though right now I have a few obstacles - I am still trying to clean and repair my Father's house and make room to set up a proper work area. While I have my old workstation sort of set up, it is on a typing table at the foot of my bed with barely room for the mousepad and keyboard. This past couple of years in the wake of my father's passing has been hectic on me...and though I am close to the other side of it now, there is still so much to do, and when life keeps throwing me these other situations to eat up my time and distract me it just drags it all out.

I am willing to learn though. I have dabbled with texturing an making image maps in Photoshop and GiMPShop. I am trying to get a better handle on unwrapping and remaking UVs - for that I have Lightwave, Wings, or Blender (Wings UV system seems the most user friendly) and I have UV Mapper but not the pro version.
You can texture with blender and photoshop next to each other. So you can use its projection texturing. That's much faster then painting in 2D
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
I ended up picking up a Refurbished Laptop off of Amazon. A Windows 10 pro 64 bit system running a quad core processor with 4 usb ports, HDMI port, Ethernet port, built in wifi, DVDRW drive, 8gb ram, and 15.6 in screen, and ethernet. It arrived today, but it is late now so I will try setting it up tomorrow and make sure it meets the specs. I would have liked more ram, but finding any laptop with enough USB ports plus a DVDRW proved difficult. Most I looked at either did not have ethernet, or did not use wifi but bluetooth, or did not have an optical drive. Even so, this almost cost as much as this old Toshiba I am typing on cost when it was brand new.

Hopefully all will work well, and I can manage to figure out Windows 10 quickly and this machine will become my new surfing system and portable workshop and I will relegate this old toshiba to a support and backup role. If everything is kosher with the new laptop I will pickup a USB bridge cable and move the important files off this laptop, and install at least a copy of Poser 11.3 on the newer laptop so I can play around while surfing the web. I will also have to figure out how to run a networked USB hard drive from my router with my massive oler runtime so multiple machines can access it from a central location.
 

DanaTA

Distinguished
I ended up picking up a Refurbished Laptop off of Amazon. A Windows 10 pro 64 bit system running a quad core processor with 4 usb ports, HDMI port, Ethernet port, built in wifi, DVDRW drive, 8gb ram, and 15.6 in screen, and ethernet. It arrived today, but it is late now so I will try setting it up tomorrow and make sure it meets the specs. I would have liked more ram, but finding any laptop with enough USB ports plus a DVDRW proved difficult. Most I looked at either did not have ethernet, or did not use wifi but bluetooth, or did not have an optical drive. Even so, this almost cost as much as this old Toshiba I am typing on cost when it was brand new.

Hopefully all will work well, and I can manage to figure out Windows 10 quickly and this machine will become my new surfing system and portable workshop and I will relegate this old toshiba to a support and backup role. If everything is kosher with the new laptop I will pickup a USB bridge cable and move the important files off this laptop, and install at least a copy of Poser 11.3 on the newer laptop so I can play around while surfing the web. I will also have to figure out how to run a networked USB hard drive from my router with my massive oler runtime so multiple machines can access it from a central location.
Good luck!

Dana
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
@DanaTA thank you. Hoping to get back to art and animation on a more regular basis soon. These last many years have been rough for me, and in the last 3 I have gotten so very little done at all.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Here's hoping it works out well. I had to upgrade to Win10 Pro 2 years ago, and I'm very comfortable with it now. Of course, I bought it new, not refurbished, but I can't imagine a source like Amazon putting something like that up for sale if it wasn't working well when they tested it.
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
I managed to set up my workstation which has been unused for the better part of the last 3 years due to this move gone wrong. I was hoping to work on some ship designs for my animated project and discovered one of my internal 1TB Hds that had my primary 3D content has become corrupted. Not all of that TB was 3D content, but the bulk of my 400+GB 3D source files, and almost all of my SFX libraries was on that drive. Some of it was backed up, but not all of it (was packed rather hastily in 2020). I am very disheartened by this. I do not know what happened, if it sat to long, was jostled too much in transit...but spent the last 3 days looking at lots of "File Sector Unreadable" in scandisk.

Not sure if the drive containing my scripts, notes, and RPG materials is ok or not. For now the computer is again idle and un-powered as I do not have the space to properly work on it and all of my tools and recovery software are in storage.

Never really got the space in this house cleared out to set everything up - and with being forced to reopen probate and move again while it's resolved just don't have the time or money to put into this. The loss of this runtime Hd is the end of the line for all of my Poser work right now. That's all she wrote. No telling if or when I will ever be able to recover from this loss this time. These last 5 years have just been too much.
 

DanaTA

Distinguished
Sorry to hear that. I hope things start going much better for you! This has been a long haul for you. Maybe a good shop can recover your files, if you don't do anything that will overwrite the data.

Dana
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
Been away a minute. Still not sure if I will be returning to 3d with any regularity, too much wrong in my life.

Today I began the arduous process of analyzing the data corruption and damage to my HDs on my graphics machine (from the incident back on June 30). I honestly avoided it for so long for several reasons, not least of which is that one of the 2 partitions has all of my custom work, figures, scenes, animation frames, textures, etc... and if that is all lost... well, where I have been at already wasn't good and this would just about end me. Currently just trying to make disk images of the two partitions, which will likely take a few days using the software and method I am using, then it will take weeks to actually see what is salvageable and what isn't.
From a cursory glance, it looks like only 1 of the partitions is damaged (the partition with the 3D content and sound effects archives - most of which is backed up but would need to be reinstalled and reorganized again). I wont know for certain until likely this weekend or mid next week.
I have really wanted to get back to making space craft and setting up animations too. Though without voice talent my animation projects are at a relative standstill. Due to issues draining my finances everything is about at a standstill.

Most of my tools and recovery software are still in storage, and I still do not have proper room to work on it because of issues surrounding the place I am staying (lots of legal issues and problems, and may be forced to move again). Some of the content on the two partitions I have old backups of, but the newest set is from around 2019. Since 2019, myself and the computer in question has been moved around a lot. I have tried to continue working on and off in some of that time, and there was a lot of content installed to the 3D runtimes. Most of the original installers are on the second partition along with all of my Poser, Lightwave, Bryce, and VUE scenes for my animations and development, all of my rendered frames, lots of my notes (though most of the actual notes and stories I was writing are on a different drive all together). While I had at one time been backing up my purchased content to DVD Roms, I have not burned any of those since 2017 for a number of reasons, and now many of the stores I had purchased from are gone forever (including here).

My plan once I have made disk images of both partitions is to scan the partition with all the scenes, frames, and installers and hope it is not damaged, and then make a permanent archive of it to a removable USB drive which I will try to update monthly...

Once I have determined what can be saved from the 3D content drive, I will begin the long task of reinstalling content which will include organizing it as I was doing - and place all of my runtimes on 2 identical cloned USB drives so I have a master and a backup that can be taken to ANY machine with a working installation of Poser 7 or later. After all, I do have multiple versions of Poser and multiple license seats for a few of them, so that is not the issue... it is making sure that where I work has the content I was using setting up the scenes in the first place.

maybe...maybe once this is all done, if the damage is not too severe, and if I know more about what is going to happen with my Father's estate, I will try to finish a few products I was working on if those figures are even still used (haven't seen many sales of my Dusk or Dawn content at Rendo...and M4/V4 is very dated so not planning more poses for them).
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
Well, the software to make an image of the drive to try to recover from has now been running for almost a month (a month on September 22) and it has not even reached 10% yet. IT is starting to look doubtful I will be able to recover either partition. Even for the size of the drive in question (2tb) this is very slow. The longer it runs the greater the chance of further damage/catastrophic failure and the greater the chance for a power outage due to weather negating any progress. Worse, while the workstation is tied up trying to recover, I can not work on any digital art, animations, or poser content.

Very, very depressed.
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
I have made no progress trying to recover the data from the HD. Likely everything is corrupt on both partitions. I do not have access to all my tools or a proper workspace which is not helping any. All of my work on my animated project and all of my rendered frames, and all of my 3D software and content purchases of the last 6 years gone. Many of the online stores those purchases were from no longer exist - so it is money that might as well have evaporated. With it my will and desire to continue to try to do any artwork or 3D development has also gone. Not that it matters because with the state of my life and everything I am dealing with in real life for the past 5 years I have gotten little done and just feel trapped. Coupled with the continued turmoil in my life and the increasing hardships caused by this pandemic I no longer feel motivate dto do much of anything. Just getting out of bed now takes more effort than I can sometimes muster. There have just been too many setbacks and losses in too rapid a succession over too long a period of time. Nothing left to do but turn the computer off indefinitely until I might have access to my recovery tools and a place to work who knows how many years from now...and by then will it even matter anymore?
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
I just had the third Drive Imaging program fail after about a month of running at 70%, and the fourth program failed as soon as I tried to start it. Very Depressed. I have lost everything in terms of my 3D work purchases and art. Wasted the last 10 years of my life.
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
As of this morning, Roadkill's Unstoppable Copier has copied the Frames directory (262gb with ALL my animation frames, 3D artworks in progress and finals, various passes of sequences unfinished and uncomposited, finished sequences, etc) without reporting any bad files or errors. Now, before getting excited, this just means it was able to copy whatever was on the damaged partition to the USB drive as it was without any read errors or problems as reported by the FAT - if the files were already corrupted or the FAT was wrong, well, they still may be damaged. I will check that later. I am moving on to try to copy out my purchased files one folder at a time. At least with ZIP and RAR files, they have a built in test ability, the frames need to be viewed one at a time. I am starting with the purchases from those store no longer in business, as anything from Rendo I can still replace... I may or may not be able to replace Hivewire content if it is damaged. RDNA, YURDigital, ContentParadise, Schell's Armor Works, and several others are gone or merged now... so... well... I will report back once I know.

I have lost this entire year with this debacle... and I have really wanted to do some artwork and animation these past months.
 

Kerya

Brilliant
{{{Hugs}}}

For Hivewire content: the vendors who moved to Renderosity had their content moved to there too. You can follow the procedure outlined by Alisa here: Transfer of Customer purchases at HiveWire 3D to the store at Renderosity
It takes time and patience to wait for the items to be transferred to your account there (and some that changed their names during the move didn't get into my account), but it is something.

RDNA: the vendors that moved to DAZ had their content moved there and the products where added automagically to your account, so you should be able to download at least those.

Schell's armor Works: you could try to contact Chris here:
https://community.hivewire3d.com/members/theschell.795/
or here:
https://sharecg.com/theschell

Good luck!
 

KageRyu

Lost Mad Soul
Contributing Artist
Progress is being made. I don't want to say more than that because I do not want to jinx anything.
 
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