Monday 10.03.08
Why, you ask am I late in posting this? The short answer for those of limited attention span who want to skip any non raiding content, is that I didn't actually get to go on a Raid last week.
The much longer, and if you are technically minded, slightly more interesting answer, goes back to when I came to Sydney from New Zealand. Before we found out we were moving to Sydney I had begun the process of building a new PC. I was researching every part, ensuring that I wasn't buying a dud and that I was getting the best price as I bought it. It took me months but I finally assembled all the pieces that I needed to build my Dream PC. Then we found out we were moving and in a very short period of time. I packed all my PC bits up carefully and consigned them to the not so gentle hands of a shipping company.
The day we had worked hard towards finally arrived, we jumped on a plane and we were in Sydney in 2.5 hours. Our possessions took slightly longer and arrived about 2.5 weeks later. The first thing I did when all my stuff arrived in Sydney was start building my new PC. Unfortunately after many hours and quite a bit of blood ( Custom PC cases are sharp!) the bloody thing wouldn't boot up. I couldn't even get it to POST, thats Power On Self Test for the non technical, thats what happens before all the text that scrolls up your screen, before the Windows screen. Basically a PC that won't POST, is very broken. So after a week of struggling with it, I ended up taking it to the local PC hardware guy to have a look at. 1000$ later I got back a working PC. Yay, sort of.
So some months go by, occasionally I have problems with boots, it hangs in BIOS load, sometimes Windows hangs, and freezes, I get little pop up error messages etc. Lots of niggling little problems, but no one thing I could pin a problem on. Then we get to last weekend, I fire up the PC, its Sunday and its raid night!, I'm getting pre-positioned for the raid, I'm halfway across Qualia when the PC freezes. Oh well, reboot and continue. Only there is no continuing. It hangs at boot, reboot, does it again, reboot get it into Windows, check the event viewer, the event viewer is solid red with disk errors, I get a pop up message about a disk error and being unable to flush to cache, disk hangs again.
This goes on for hours, I manage to get into the game briefly to tell everybody I wont be able to make the raid and go back to checking cables, I check the seating of Drives and Drive cables into the motherboard, running hardware level tests against the drives, heat tests against the CPU, RAM tests etc. In fact this goes on for days.
I talk about this with people at work trying to get some inspiration as to what may be causing this. I read constantly on drive faults, cache faults, anything about drives, I update all my drivers for graphics card, motherboard chip sets, sound card, BIOS, hard drive firmware, Direct X, in fact anything I can update, I do update. I am turning hardware caching on and off, moving page files, setting page file dynamic vs static, checking and replacing cables, changing power management profiles, anything I can think of or is recommended to me. At the end of it all I come to the conclusion that the motherboard is about to fail and I am going to have to take it back to the local hardware guy. I no longer have the space, the tools or the inclination to do this sort of work myself anymore.
At this point I have now missed Sunday, Monday and Wednesday raids. I have been off line for seven whole days, I'm beginning to feel bugs crawling under my skin.
About a week later I am deep into a Google search about the following error:
"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D."
This is the error that has is being generated every 30 seconds in my logs. This is the error that precedes every hang/crash. About 6 pages into the Google search I find this set of errors as part of a knowledge base article on Microsoft.com. What do you know!, this describes, exactly, all of the errors I have been having for the last 12 months. So I sign up, download and install the patch.
I haven't had a crash, hang or an error generated in any of my logs since. If I had upgraded my hardware I may have ended up with exactly the same error as the original fault was extremely rare and Windows related to start with. I make my living from computers, have done for a lot of years now and some days I just fucking hate them.
----------------
Now playing: DJ Le Clown - In Da Black (AC/DC vs. 50 Cent vs. Scissor Sisters)
Now playing: DJ Payroll - Daft Prayer (Bon Jovi vs. Daft Punk)
No comments:
Post a Comment