Giant moon night
Mar. 19th, 2011 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoTonight is the perigee full moon. The moon is at it's closest point to the earth and also full. These two conditions coincide only about once every 19 or 20 years. The moon will look about 14% larger and appear 30% brighter than it does when at its greatest distance. It was certainly bright enough last night to cast shadows and read by. I can't say about tonight, because we are overcast. If you have a clear sky be sure to take a look.
After repeated experiments with CHKDSK, none of which ran to completion, I gave up. Every sure-fire cure offered by web pages and individuals made no difference at all. CHKDSK on Gary's drive simply stalls near the start of phase 2 and sits there. I let it sit for more than eight hours on the last attempt, with no sign of progress. The task was using no CPU cycles and a fixed amount of memory when I killed it.
Instead, I went into the Windows Registry and altered the autocheck invocation on boot up so that it will no longer try to check that drive. Gary was finally able to retrieve his files from the drive, and so far all have been intact and usable. Once he has all the files he needs off, we'll try formatting the drive. It's a 1.5 TB SATA drive, so I expect a low level format will take many hours too. It's under warranty, so if it won't format, we'll get it replaced.
Not as springlike today as I'd hoped, but at least it was sunny. Birds are coming to life: cardinals and robins singing, blackbirds calling, woodpeckers drumming. I saw a huge hawk late this afternoon, circling and circling overhead. Probably hoping for a try at one of the neighbors' kids...
Oh, and I see we now have Obama's war to add to Bush's wars that are not yet resolved. While I agree it is time for Qaddafi to give up his power in Libya, the hypocrisy of the US accusations and behaviors in this are just too overwhelming for words.
After repeated experiments with CHKDSK, none of which ran to completion, I gave up. Every sure-fire cure offered by web pages and individuals made no difference at all. CHKDSK on Gary's drive simply stalls near the start of phase 2 and sits there. I let it sit for more than eight hours on the last attempt, with no sign of progress. The task was using no CPU cycles and a fixed amount of memory when I killed it.
Instead, I went into the Windows Registry and altered the autocheck invocation on boot up so that it will no longer try to check that drive. Gary was finally able to retrieve his files from the drive, and so far all have been intact and usable. Once he has all the files he needs off, we'll try formatting the drive. It's a 1.5 TB SATA drive, so I expect a low level format will take many hours too. It's under warranty, so if it won't format, we'll get it replaced.
Not as springlike today as I'd hoped, but at least it was sunny. Birds are coming to life: cardinals and robins singing, blackbirds calling, woodpeckers drumming. I saw a huge hawk late this afternoon, circling and circling overhead. Probably hoping for a try at one of the neighbors' kids...
Oh, and I see we now have Obama's war to add to Bush's wars that are not yet resolved. While I agree it is time for Qaddafi to give up his power in Libya, the hypocrisy of the US accusations and behaviors in this are just too overwhelming for words.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 02:09 pm (UTC)On the hard drive issue, I was wondering if the manufacturer diagnostic tools still work. Though I've had those to lock up as well...
Might be interesting to run Spinrite on it too, though it might choke on the large drive size. And it has a price tag attached to it too. And in the end, full reformat should do the same trick anyways, unless there's some progressing physical damage on the platters.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 02:51 pm (UTC)Spinrite would be interesting to try if we had it, but we don't. At this point I'm confident that the hardware has failed and must be replaced, so it doesn't justify $90 for Spinrite. The drive is under warranty, he just has to contact them for instructions.
Left the machine running overnight, without CHKDSK active or anything but the drive was online. It had a blues creen in the morning with Stop code 0x00008086. Apparently the most common cause of that error is a hard drive failure. More evidence. I'm not at all impressed by the track record of these gigantic capacity drives. He was sure he needed all that but he's only used about 10% of it in two years. I tried to get him to go with two or three smaller drives in a RAID array, but he rejected that as "too hard to understand." However, since I somehow end up doing the support work anyway, I'm going to insist on it next time around.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 10:37 am (UTC)About the usefulness of Spinrite, I gather that a minor power flicker would be enough to make an uncomplete write to the disk, which would confuse the drive electronics enough to make it act a bit strange. Thus it might be that the full format might fix the thing. But if they're willing to hand out a new drive as replacement, that works too.
RAID might be handy too, though now the biggest trouble seems to be flaky RAID controllers. ^^;
But then again, there's always something failing with computers. :-)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 09:27 pm (UTC)It's a Seagate drive, and they do have a diagnostic program. It runs under Windows and requires you to install it there before using it. Ugh. Very different from the old smart ones that ran from floppy, CD, or USB flash drive and were independent of the operating system.