Mike Milo's Journal

So after all the rave reviews of simplicity installing the Crucial 256gb SSD drive, I decided it was idiot proof enough for me to install so I went and plunked down the change to buy one and waited excitedly for it to come in the mail…

It came in the mail and I got all excited about how I could put the Adobe suite on there, Maybe a li’ Maya action, some Z-Brush… Oh I was gonna ROCK this new spiffy hard drive! Yeah!

Well I installed the drive no problem booted it up and for the life of me could NOT get the Asus to recognize the drive.

I tried this:
How to initialize your SSD (Windows) – Crucial Community

and nothing happened…

For a bit I ran into not being able to boot to the bios either which of course scared me until I found this:
[B121] Force the Slate enter BIOS error: Reboot and Select proper Boot device

But my drive had been shut down correctly so again I basically had a very expensive eye patch which was pretty much useless except in case of Borg attack.

For a while i thought it might be that the ext DVD drive didn’t have enough power or something but the disk whirred and the drive seemed to be working.
I even tried to use a standard Windows 7 disk wondering if perhaps the disk itself was either faulty or that my Asus wasn’t recognizing it.

Nope, that was not it either,

Then in an amazing coincidence of frustration and irritation I happened to mash the little half moon button on the right side of the Asus and viola, it recognized the disk and began to install!

I was so excited! Parades were going off in my head, hot chicks throwing confetti, life was suddenly good again and I basked in my ingenuity!
Installing… installing… Yeah baby, Wait for it wait wait… ohhh yeah it’s done! Reboot reboot! So excited!

I’m gonna install all sorts of software rocking my new Crucial 256gb SSD drvie… and it’s gonna be gr-

Wait what’s this?
BOOTMGR is missing?
WTF?!?!?

No..no..no..no..nooooooooooooo!

And that’s my story.
So while it may have been easy for some of you, it’s NOT always a piece of cake.
Still trying to figure out how to get rid of the Bootmgr missing thing.
Wish me luck! :-/

UPDATE: 11/19/12

So I solved the problem by cloning the original hard drive. using a wonderful little free tool called Drive Image XML… It cloned the entire hard drive and although it still needed a fix via booting up with  my Windows 7 disk and running a repair routine,  I got it to finally work.

Now you may say to yourself, so what? What’s so cool about that?

Well the thing is that Motion only officially supports 1.5 gb of memory on the LE 1600 and yet as you can see by my screen cap I have 2 gb! Pretty cool!

How did I do it you say? It’s Photoshop you say?

Nah… actually I didn’t do anything. The Motion LE1600 comes with 512 mb of memory soldered onto the board and there’s only one slot for additional memory. For some reason if you put a 2 gb card into the slot it disables the 512mb on the board and accepting the 2gb stick you just installed! It’s a shame it disables the soldered 512mb I know but at least I have an extra 512mb than I used to have!

Sweet!

As I’ve said before I was on the beta team for SBP earlier this year and my frequent posting and keyboard diarrhea on the forums there got the attention of the guys over at Autodesk I guess.
Anyway, they asked me to write an article on Digital Storyboarding and I have to say I had so much fun doing it, I want to do more! Article writing is fun! I only wish I had learned that writing could be fun back in school. I might have turned out better!

Anyway, you can read the article here.

Last night I went a little crazy and tried to install Vista Ultimate on my LE1600 Tablet PC. I say it’s crazy because although Vista is supposed to work on it, the Ultimate version is not because of Aero.
Well so far so good, in fact I am writing this post on my Vista enabled tablet PC right now!

Will it work forever? I have no idea but it works today!

A few more details below…

Turning off all the bells and whistles in Aero doesn’t seem to make the Tablet faster. I’m not sure if Vista automatically configures itself to work on the Tablet or if it just installs Ultimate and then lets you see what works and what doesn’t but in the settings I have all the eye candy set to on and my lil’ LE 1600 is chugging away jes’ fine. (more…)

Until recently I’ve been using the same animation desk that I used in art school- a drafting table with a hole cut in it and a light under it. Last year a friend of mine was selling a Hanna Barbera desk which is really cool as I know that stuff like Dexter’s Lab and Powerpuff Girls was drawn on as well as many other cartoons. Anyway I brought it home but never really set it up until my brother helped me fix my studio up a bit.

I swear I have the modern day version of Termite Terrace.

Milowerx Studios 2008

Another shot of my studio, You can see my house in the distance to the left.

Anyway, I reorganized my studio and setup my tablet PC on the Hanna Barbera desk- sort of old meets new. I love it!

Here’s some pics…

This was my original desk bought in 1987

Here’s a shot of my portable tablet on the desk in the Family room at my house…
I do this every night because my Father-in-Law sleeps in my studio at night…

Another shot of the Portable Tablet PC on my make-shift desk

Here’s a shot my new setup in my studio ( converted Guest house).
This is the Hanna Barbera desk I bought for $100! Sweet huh?

Another angle on my Animation Desk Setup.

Yet another angle on my Animation Desk setup.

Here’s an opposite angle looking from my animation desk. This is my basic PC setup.
Nothing special but it ain’t bad. the guest house is about
600 sq. feet which is pretty good for what I need.

A cool review of my Tablet PC!

A friend of mine just bought a Motion Computing Tablet PC just like mine and he was asking how I do my work with it and I thought it might be best to show him with a demo… soooo, I was playing around with Camtasia last night and recorded myself drawing and rendering an alligator. Granted it’s not the most ingenious design but it wasn’t intended to be. In order to show it I had to put break it up and put it on Youtube which will only take 100 mb and 10 minutes of time.

Anyway… check it out and let me know if you dig it!

Here’s the first part where I redline the drawing and clean it up.

Here’s the 2nd part where I color the character.

And finally here’s the last part where I render it out a bit.