Week of trials
My main PC is still not fully functional. It seems several components were on the verge of failure. The trauma of transplanting disks seems to have tipped two of them over the edge. Not knowing for sure what was going on, after all I was installing two different operating systems in a dual-boot configuration, I was beginning to doubt my skills. I’m relieved to finally make the determination that it’s not me.
First there was a cable problem. Never having used the secondary connector of that particular cable, I had no way of knowing it was bad for all this time. Once I got that replaced, I thought I had it licked. Not so.
For a while now, I’ve heard occassional grumbles that I couldn’t identify. In fact, given that I’m prone to hearing things (Read: auditory hallucinations) and it sounded like the door buzzer from another apartment muffled through the floors and walls, I figured it was me.
As the week wore on, it became clear it was coming from the computer. I next thought, fan bearing. Nope. Systematically unplugging each fan made no difference. Hmmm. Drives? It didn’t seem like the right frequency. These are 7200 rpm drives so you’d think anything coming from them would be higher in pitch. But they’re fluid bearings not ball bearings, so maybe that causes the vibration to be transposed down several octaves.
By then is was sounding like a cell phone set on vibrate. And I knew I wasn’t hallucinating it because I could feel it in my feet.
I systematically unplugged each of the six hard drives and found that one of the 40GB Seagates was the culprit. Aha! I’d been using that drive for the swap/paging files of each operatin system and for the temp directory under Wndows and and the /tmp directory under Linux.
That would accound for the flakiness I was experiencing under both Windows XP and Fedora Core 3 Linux. And, I’d used that drive for the same purpose when the box was 100% Windows, so that could also explain some the the flakiness that cause me to embark on this project in the first place.
Unfortunately, that drive is six months out of warranty, so there’s nothing I can do about it. Can’t afford a replacement right now, but even so, I had over a half-terabyte remaining on the other five drives.
That’s not exactly limp-along mode, (yet) but it did require a change in the way I allocated space between and within the operating systems. I’m flexible now, remember?
Reinstall Windows. Reinstall Linux. By the way, I’ve reinstalled Windows enough last week that I have that stupid 25-character code memorized. And I’ve activated it often enough that I’m expecting the Microsoft Police to rappel from black helicopters and crash through the windows at any minute.
Heh. Microsoft Police crashing windows. Now there’s a thought.
This brings us up through Saturday. I awoke feeling good about the whole thing. I figured I’d have things presentable and usable by the time CBC showed up.
No, afraid not.
Reallocating space meant moving existing stuff around. This uncovered more flakiness. This time on a not quite two-year-old Maxtor 160GB drive. Worse, it was my main backup repository.
I’ve spent the whole of Saturday and Sunday pulling files off it one-by-one. In the end, I lost some data. Nothing I can’t get back off archives somewhere, except for some old server backups.
I’m not sure what the law is regarding log and backup retention for my server business. I know ISPs are required to retain access logs for at least a year. And that was before the Patriot act. Not sure what applies to HSPs (Hosting Service Providers). So using the ISP regulations as a model, I’ve kept the weekly full backups for a year.
Well, I lost everything before February of this year. If this disturbs the Feds, they’re welcome to that drive and God bless ‘em if they can get anything off of it.
UPDATE:
Well, it seems that much of problem has been due to ignorance.
XP, is not as modern an operating system as you might imagine. Seems that no matter that your BIOS can see drives bigger than 137GB, or that Linux can, or even that tired, old Caldera DR-DOS can, (Partition Magic boots from a floppy to DR-DOS), no, no matter that, Windows XP cannot use more that 137GB without a patch.
Said patch is helpfully offered on the Maxtor web site. I downloaded and installed it this morning, along with the PwerMax diagnostics. PowerMax reports that the one 160GB drive I’ve tested is just fine. (The suspect one is disconnected.) Just for balls, I ran MaxBlast on the two 80GB drives. One failed. To wit: “Error 676e6d72 This drive is failing.”
Oh joy.
Another trying week begins…
