Still on dialup

[altivo]

But maybe back to more or less normal tomorrow.

Pulled out the old system disk for Gary's machine, with note on it saying it had Win XP SP3 as of Aug. 2009 on it. Popped it in as C: drive and it booted. Needs some drivers installed and then a ton of Windows Update probably, which will run overnight. After that our LAN and internet access will be working again.

The "failed" drive is demoted to secondary status. Windows still wants to CHKDSK it every time it starts, and hangs in the CHKDSK. No errors, but it just sits there doing nothing in phase 2 of the scan. Oddly, if you skip the scan, then the disk is readable and appears to be functionally normal with all the data in place, but of course there's no way to verify the readability of every one of those thousands of files. In theory, though, he can back up any files he still needs from there and we can try reformatting. I've got a feeling it will fail the reformat, but it has a five year warranty and is only 18 months old.

Meantime he has all his necessary school stuff on the laptop anyway, and most of a backup of the other stuff was already in place on a USB external drive that can be loaded to the laptop. The painful bit will be reconnecting his Thunderbird e-mail files to a reinstalled Thunderbird. No matter how many times I do this, it's a process fraught with errors and confusion. The way it works seems to change every time they update Thunderbird. Or maybe I should say, the way it doesn't work.

Finally got started on the peep thing. Built the backdrop and the witch's castle (such as it is, crammed into a shoebox.) Now I have to dress the figures: Elphaba needs a hat, Dorothy needs an apron, Chisterly needs monkey wings (bat wings, actually,) and then the Cowardly Lion, who'll need quite a costuming deal even after building him from a rabbit peep and half of another. It would be fun to do this as serious art, but I don't have time. So it's being thrown together the way any kid does it on the night before the project is due. ;p

Comments

[hrrunka]

I wonder whether here might be an MBR or partition table problem that linux happily ignores? Irritating, whatever it is. Hope you're back on not-dial-up soon.

[altivo]

Back to "slightly-better-than-dialup-3G-service" now. This also means that my netbook works again, which mattered rather more to me.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the NTFS issue is, but at the moment I'm inclined to guess that those letters stand for New Terribly Fragile System. I've seen similar issues several times, and it's impossible to tell whether the hardware has failed, the file system has become corrupt, or the CHKDSK command is just lame. Since the spot in scanning where CHKDSK starts looping is checking the index entries, and indexing is supposedly optional on NTFS, I'm tempted to just turn off the indexing in the properties. Supposedly this makes it slower, but you can't get slower than an endless loop.

[hrrunka]

Ah. Coming fom a *nix view of things, I never did understand why folks raved about NTFS. About all it had going for it was that it wasn't FAT. Not that the various *nix flavours havn't had their own share of interestingly unstable file systems, of course...

[altivo]

From a Windows point of view, I think the most exciting thing about NTFS was the fact that it offered greater levels of security. (Providing of course that the OS implemented those effectively and consistently, which in my opinion Windows has failed to do.) The ability to apply file and user specific ACLs was already in UNIX-like systems and in DEC's VMS, so Microsoft had to catch up. Fortunately they got a former lead developer from DEC to help them along. Unfortunately, they never quite understood how it worked.

[deffox]

That's not comforting that it's hanging on chkdsk.

Sometimes Windows XP will keep running scandisk on a good drive because the drive has a dirty bit that is flipped. I saved this procedure from when one of my machines was doing it.

1. click on your start menu and open the run dialog.
2. type "cmd" and return (note: dont enter quotes)
3. Next type "fsutil dirty query e:"
4. If the return message indicates that the volume is dirty go to step 5
5. Next type "chkdsk e: /f /x"
6. After that finshes repeat step 3.
7. If it is no longer dirty then reboot and you should notice no more
ckdisk.

[altivo]

I did try "chkdsk f: /f /i /x" but that still hung in phase 2 of the scan. That's where it checks indexes for consistency or something. This is a huge drive (1.5 TB) and at first I thought it was just slow. It takes hours to format one of those. But after 30 minutes at 1% completion, I figured if it was that slow, we'd be dead before it ever completed.

I can try your suggestion. It's easy enough. The drive is still in the bay and connected, I just disabled it in the BIOS. A few keystrokes and a reboot will bring it back online.