Windows 10 Clean Install

[hilldweller]

Does the Linux you are using on the Pi make using USB drives easy? As I understand it Linux doesn't see external drives in the way Windows does and this confused me when I tried it.

Apologies, I missed this first time around.

Almost too easy. Plug in a USB drive of any kind, it recognises it, it offers to open up a file manager window. You can drag and drop just as in windows but with no permission hassel.

I just thought of one I hadn't tried, plugged my Android phone into the Pi3 and both the phone and Pi responded as they should.

USB hard drive, because of the limited Pi power supply it would need a modern low current one or externally powered drive.

Your problem of how Linux mounts a drive. Yes, without the file manager it is a pain to find them but luckily the supplied file manager sorts this out and uses the drive's own name rather that something like mnt/sd01 which it might be using internally.

 

[hilldweller]

An update on Hilldweller and Linux.

I'm absolutely delighted with Linux with a single problem - video editing. I had a nice simple paid for Windows editor, Filmora. I've tried many Linux ones, free and not worth the money. Openshot is look alike of Filmora but it's totally unreliable yet so nearly good. I guess that's what happens when you give your work away, can't afford to time to perfect it.

So I came up with a cunning plan - buy W7 off eBay and do a clean W7 install on a new HD. As I type, W7 is running Filmora chopping adverts out of a saved film and I have updates turned off so MS is not taking over my PC.

There a few other old pieces of software a may need on windows which I knew when I loaded Linux so altogether not a real disaster.

It seemed such a good idea to accept MS's offer of free W10 last year.

 

[Gromett]

An update on Hilldweller and Linux.

I'm absolutely delighted with Linux with a single problem - video editing. I had a nice simple paid for Windows editor, Filmora. I've tried many Linux ones, free and not worth the money. Openshot is look alike of Filmora but it's totally unreliable yet so nearly good. I guess that's what happens when you give your work away, can't afford to time to perfect it.

So I came up with a cunning plan - buy W7 off eBay and do a clean W7 install on a new HD. As I type, W7 is running Filmora chopping adverts out of a saved film and I have updates turned off so MS is not taking over my PC.

There a few other old pieces of software a may need on windows which I knew when I loaded Linux so altogether not a real disaster.

It seemed such a good idea to accept MS's offer of free W10 last year.

that's a shame. I use openshot a lot and have not had any problems with it. The only thing it lacks for me is scrolling titles.

Have you considered trying running windows under either KVM or VirtualBox. You then don't need to swap hard disks?

 

[hilldweller]

that's a shame. I use openshot a lot

I wonder where I'm going wrong then. I've just added 4G of RAM to make 8G. I'm running an AMD quad core. I don't recall any other Linux programs crashing. Google does show that I am not alone with Open Shot problems.

But this W7 is pretty impressive. I've got it on it's own HD and just use the BIOS to pick it when needed. Nice and clean and full speed plus I can access some of day to day files used under Linux.

 

[chesterfield hooligan]

Like many folk on here my PC upgraded itself to Windows 10 last year which I was happy with but then a major update came out, the Anniversary edition as it is sometimes called but this simply wouldn't install on my machine. Installation just froze whatever I did.

I ignored this problem as after each frozen installation it would restore the original installation and the problem went away after it stopped trying to update itself.

Then, as you do, I decided to upgrade my machine by fitting an SSD drive in place of the current 1TB hard disc. After a quick read of a few reviews I chose a 500MB jobbie from Samsung and £144 lighter fitted it a couple of days ago.

The problem, which is what this Thread is about, is I didn't have a product key and my original Windows 7 Pro was an OEM version which has limitations on hardware changes. Accepting the worst case would be having to shell out for a "proper" version on Windows 10 I went ahead with the installation.

I had downloaded the Windows 10 iso file and burned it to a DVD. I had earlier tried creating a bootable USB using the file you can download from Microsoft but whatever I did I couldn't get the PC to boot from it. All the settings were correct in the BIOS but it just wouldn't work, hence the DVD.

The SSD drive came with a CD which had a facility to clone your existing drive but I wanted to do a clean install so I disconnected the HD, connected the SSD, inserted the DVD and away it went. Installation took an hour or so, I thought it would be much faster with the SSD but it wasn't.

When all was working it announced it had a major upgrade to download, which it did and this was the 4GB Anniversary update. Why the iso file I downloaded from MS wasn't the latest version of W10 is a mystery.

After several more cups of tea I had a working Windows 10 PC and on inspection it told me it was activated. During the first stage of installation it asks you to enter a product key but there is also the option, which I chose, to click "I don't have a product key". I had read that you may have to activate by telephone but this wasn't required, it just registered itself online. I've no idea how it did this given I had changed the drive on the PC so there was no copy of the original W10 upgrade available.

Of course the catch is all my data was still on the original HD so I reconnected it and rebooted. At this point I made a mistake I think. The PC booted up using the HD not the SSD. I think I should have changed the BIOS settings to put the SSD above the HD but I didn't. Not realising there was a problem I went ahead and copied over the data, which was fairly quick with speeds of over 100MB/s at times.

When finished I disconnected the HD and rebooted again. Zippo. No bootable drive found.

Without going into boring detail the SSD drive was no longer bootable or even visible in the BIOS. In the end I had to reformat it using the utility which came with the drive CD which wasn't a simple exercise. You have to create a bootable DOS DVD and unfreeze the drive by disconnecting the power cable only while it is switched on.

So I set about reinstalling W10 again, going through the 4GB download again.

I then connected the original HD using an external drive case and USB cable. Data transfer was a tad slower of course but we are all now sorted.

Phew!

Lessons learned were you can do a clean install of W10 without a product key and be careful having two bootable drives in the same machine.

and how much is a new lappy

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[Gromett]

I wonder where I'm going wrong then. I've just added 4G of RAM to make 8G. I'm running an AMD quad core. I don't recall any other Linux programs crashing. Google does show that I am not alone with Open Shot problems.

But this W7 is pretty impressive. I've got it on it's own HD and just use the BIOS to pick it when needed. Nice and clean and full speed plus I can access some of day to day files used under Linux.

Ah, When it comes to video editing I think memory is your biggest issue. Depends on the size of video file.

I have 32GB in my system, and currently on an intel quad core. The old AMD cpu's were absolute dogs performance wise. That said my next system (next year) will be a Ryzen or a Threadripper from AMD. Those are seriously nice CPU's with 8+ cores and double that in thread count and lots of nice pcie channels. If I had the money the new Epyc CPU would be on my must buy list with a 32 Core 64 thread. But at $4,000 it is just out of my price range

That all said. an 8GB machine for openshot shouldn't be an issue for 20-40 minute videos? Anything over that may cause it to swap out....

Hold on, as I was typing that I think I may have realised your issue. Windows can dynamically allocate swap file. Linux doesn't by default. So if you use all you 8GB memory up and only have say 2GB of swap file. You may be burning through all your memory if you are doing this on 60-90 minute films.

get a command prompt up and run
free -m

I can tell from this how much memory you have.

After you have had a crash, have a look in either /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog and if you see OOM (out of memory) errors this is you problem.

You can set linux to use a dynamic swap file but this is slower than a static one, but it does avoid OOM crashes.

If this is your issue, either google linux dynamic swap file. or come back to me and I will tell you how.

 

[Gromett]

PS: I have this in my to buy list on Amazon, but am holding out for threadripper.



This £450 CPU out performs Intels £2,000 CPU for productivity stuff.

 

[hilldweller]

This £450 CPU out performs Intels £2,000 CPU for productivity stuff.

I'm not in that much of a hurry.

Still in W7, on second movie with no problems, so working from memory.

I pulled up the system monitor in L and with OpenShot rendering a film all 4 cores were near 100% but only 2.? G of RAM in use.

Filmora under W7 was taking only 50% of the 4 cores.

ISTR L had a swap file of 3.2G.

If you looked over my shoulder at Filmora you's say it was Open Shot, it certainly inspired the Open Shot guy.

 

[Gromett]

I'm not in that much of a hurry.

Still in W7, on second movie with no problems, so working from memory.

I pulled up the system monitor in L and with OpenShot rendering a film all 4 cores were near 100% but only 2.? G of RAM in use.

Filmora under W7 was taking only 50% of the 4 cores.

ISTR L had a swap file of 3.2G.

If you looked over my shoulder at Filmora you's say it was Open Shot, it certainly inspired the Open Shot guy.

I did a test to see if I could break openshot. I loaded all three hobbit films back to back. Cut out the opening and closing credits then set it exporting.
I couldn't get it to crash. I left it going for 30 minutes. I think this was a pretty extreme test as the end video would have been many many hours long.

What are you doing when it crashes on your system?

 

[hilldweller]

What are you doing when it crashes on your system?

Once or twice it's been something like snip a bit out, join and BANK OS has vanished, L working fine on boot screen.

Then I left if rendering and came back to the boot screen since I had a couple of other screens open, as a test, but doing nothing and they had gone it was a crash and re-boot.

I have totally re-jigged this PC now. Because I rushed L dual boot I had it spread across 2 HDs so did some backups formatted two HDs and did a clean install of L + W7. I'm now re-building my L software as I need it. But since we are talking, why not try OS right now..............

OS running with a head-cam project, 30 or 40 mins video.
Swap 3.2G, 0 used.
Memory 1.6G out of 7G
CPU 4 x 10%
Now -- hit export.
All CPU at 100%
Memory 34% Swap 0%

Watch this space !

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[hilldweller]

13:12 and it's finished a 4.2G 45 min video.

Pity I hadn't finished the edit but it gives me the incentive to have another go.

 

[Gromett]

I had a look at the memory usage on mine while doing it, very little memory was used. I still had 14GB left and I have swap disabled on my system currently.

Bear in mind though I have a full stack of web services installed (php-fpm, nginx, mysql db and loads more) for dev work.

I am really looking forward to next year for getting a thread ripper system though. 16 cores and 32 threads is very appealing. I would love to stretch to the Epyc CPU with 32 cores and 64 threads but can't justify the cost unfortunately.

However even the Ryzen 7 is worth getting with 8 cores 16 threads if you do anything with video production. For instance handbrake runs like a rocket on the AMD R7 beating even Intels top of the line CPU's that cost 1,000's

 

[hilldweller]

I had a look at the memory usage on mine while doing it

I think I've found it's big problem. I added a sound track and now the CPU usage has gone berserk, up and down like a bride's nightie with RAM up to 6.2G and a 14M swap file. But at least I finished the edit and it is still running.