The Drive, She Died.
For the past week my home desktop (running Vista x64 at the moment) would periodically lock up to the point that I’d have to completely power cycle it. This weekend I finally took some time to try and see what was going on.
Initially, I was thinking it might be related to heat and the latest video card I had swapped in a few weeks back . However, switching back to the previous card made no difference and I locked up shortly afterwards.
I also noticed I was locking up more often and quicker after powering up.
At one point I had just finished logging into Vista and was in the Explorer looking over the drive contents to size up what apps I had and ponder possible software conflicts. Suddenly the drive disappeared just as the machine locked up! Ah ha, a clue.
Rebooted, drive was there again. Launched My Computer and watched it disappear again a little bit later. Popped into the BIOS and saw the SATA channel disabled. Yikes. Re-enabled it and repeated the cycle above.
Fired up SpinRite, but it panicked and wouldn’t touch the drive. Seems it was running *very* hot (60 C). I wonder if that (or S.M.A.R.T.?) are what disabled it in the BIOS?
Now, I should make a small confession: This particular drive was pretty old. I got it used over 3 years ago. Seems a RAID controller had marked it as failed… I replaced it in the mirror, then spent some time testing it and all seemed fine. SpinRite loved it. However, the controller wouldn’t take it back so it came home with me. Been flawless since then – well, until now of course. In other words, this was probably a bit of a time-bomb anyways.
OK, moving along…
I connected it to a USB to SATA/IDE adapter and managed to get a few more files from it, but it shortly went completely dead. Even put it in the freezer overnight. Now the drive will spin up, but neither Windows nor several Linux distributions can recognize anything on it anymore.
Some good news: I was able to replace it with something larger for about $50. I also had good backups so haven’t lost any data.
The bad news: A lot of my windows apps were installed on that drive. Windows ain’t happy anymore.
Time to reload. But what OS? Windows 7 RC? Back to Ubuntu or Fedora Core? Vista x64 again? Something to ponder today.
Gosh Darn, I’m Worth It
The home server flamed out last week eating its own boot and apps drive. I’ve used that as the starting point of simplifying the home network. No more domain controllers, simple profiles and sharing. My home PC will host the shared printer, music library and such.
However, the server’s death left a (relatively) large gap in the amount of shared storage available to us. Switching from domain based user profiles to non-domain is a pain in the keister and has caused some annoyances. I’ve decided that all the home machines are going to get reloads over the next month or two.
You can see me lining up the rationalization for a new hard drive for my PC right? And heck, if a guy’s going to buy a new drive, maybe the guy should take advantage of newer technology? My trusty old Asus mobo supports SATA and I’ve never even had a drive to use it!
I do now. I went for speed over size and picked up a Western Digital Raptor this afternoon. 10,000 RPM. SATA. 16MB cache {insert Tim Allen grunts here}.
Ran into a small snag: Since my boot drive is SATA, I needed to give the XP installer a floppy with drivers (ugh). It wouldn’t see my trusty USB floppy drive so I had to scavenge up a working floppy drive/cable from some relics in the garage. The floppy drive has 1995 stamped on it…
But hey, if Atwood and Hanselman say this is a good idea, who am I to argue?!? Well, I’ll disagree with Hanselman’s rush to Vista…
I’m going to load OS and apps on it to keep everything zippy. The former boot drive is another Western Digital, the once hot 80GB Caviar JB and will now be the data drive. It’ll also house “My Documents” just to isolate things a bit.
It’s a bit silly to put that drive in a machine sporting an AMD 2500+ (barton core), 1GB of RAM and a mighty GForce 6800 GT video card, but hey — I’ll just upgrade one step at a time. Besides, how much horsepower does it take to crank out blog posts and build simple little apps and plugins?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a machine to set up.
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