25. August 2009 by admin.

If you’re familiar with RAIDs (redundant array of independent disks,) you’ll know that RAID 0, or striped set offers the fastest hard drive input and output for playing games, capturing and editing digital video, or accessing any large database or file. You’ll also know that it places the data in the riskiest position, as failure of either or any drive in the array will render the data inaccessible and possibly lost for good. Thus, with your data saved in a RAID 0, it’s extremely imperative to have a good backup plan in place.

My summer RAID outing came two weeks ago, when a new customer called and said his Dell desktop wouldn’t boot. It sounded like a typically corrupted or failing hard disk, so rather than make a house call, I told him to unplug everything and drop it off here (where I usually will boot to Knoppix and try to backup the data before running disk diagnostics; chkdsk; virus removal; or possible replacement of the HD.) When the customer arrived in my driveway I had to sympathize: it was a behemoth Dell XPS 9xx something or other, weighing in at about 70 or 80 lbs with two SATA hard disks in a RAID 0, and two Nvidia 8800 GTXs in SLI formation. Did I mention it was freaking heavy?

We wrestled it into my kitchen and I began my analysis. Booting Knoppix showed two hard drives with unknown file system. I pressed F12 and booted the Dell diagnostic. Drive 0 consistently showed read errors, while Drive 1 was good. I knew it needed at least one hard drive, but which was which? The diagnostic does show the drive serial number so I jotted that down in case SATA 1 was other than Drive 0. Then I checked the service tag for warranty info. Voila— it’s covered for at least two more years!

I called and got Dell to offer the HD, but they wanted some personal ID from the customer which I didn’t have. I proceeded to boot Acronis Drive Image to try and clone the striped volume to an external 500GB USB drive. Got about ten percent and it stuck on those damned read errors. A second attempt yielded the same result, so I switched tactics. This time I ran Acronis Backup to select just the user directories and saved those to a backup file on the external drive.

While waiting for the customer to call back I thought about the situation: Dell will give him one 250GB SATA drive, but he had a 500GB array and the other 250GB drive might not be long for this world either. Because this was just a home PC, not a gaming box, I decided to go buy one 500GB SATA drive and forget about the RAID. Later that night I pulled out my Dell XP Pro SP3 disc. After rummaging through a few Intel SATA driver floppies, I finally had XP installing on the new drive, just happy that this RAID would leave the customer with more than zero.

Posted in storage, hardware, backup | 2 Comments »

15. June 2009 by admin.

It started a few days ago when I turned on the PC. Booted normally, but the Start Windows sound was under water. This held true for all audio (MP3s, web streams, Youtube and so on.) At first I thought a sound driver might be corrupt, but I also noticed other odd symptoms: the mouse lagged and the cursor stuck occasionally. A virus? No warnings from Nod32, so I ran CCleaner first and was about to start Malwarebytes, when I got the answer: Windows error popped up “Delay write failed” while CCleaner was deleting temp files. Oh-oh! While just the partition might be corrupt, I started to worry about the hard drive–a 160GB PATA. This is my basic work, email, Outlook, and small business PC. It’s a Socket 462 Athlon XP (Abit KV7-V) so no speed demon– just a functional desktop. And it’s also not backed up!

I do have a 500GB SATA drive in a hot-swap bay, but I use that for temporary backups of customer data, not my own.  Every once in a while, I’ll securely erase that drive. I just need to plug in another SATA to run my own backup every few days. But it’s a case of do as I say, not as I do. I had a 320GB SATA drive handy, so I booted Acronis Drive Image and tried to clone the primary IDE to SATA in the hotswap bay. No dice– Acronis couldn’t see the drive. I rebooted a couple times to ssee if the Via RAID would detect the new drive and… no it didn’t. So, I plugged the 320GB SATA into a USB adapter and booted Acronis. At first, no detection, but replugging the USB found it. I started the cloning operation. After five minutes it showed a read error. First I clicked retry a couple times– no dice. So I clicked Ignore All, and proceeded to clone for about an hour. Finished, and then plugged the SATA into SATA 1, with the hot swap bay at SATA 2 (only two SATA ports on this board.)  Arggh! DISK ERROR–OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND.

Ouch! OK, I figured I’d [1] get the VIA SATA drivers, and [2] maybe update the BIOS. Meanwhile, I plugged the bad PATA into a spare box with a good 200GB PATA drive and ran Acronis again to clone IDE master to slave. Started this around 10 p.m. It still read 2 hours remaining when I went to bed at 3 a.m. (Thinking to myself– this ain’t gonna work!)

This a.m. it was done, and I plugged in then 200GB drive. Read Error on drive 0. Still not out of the woods. OK let’s try this: got the 320GB SATA and put it on USB adaptor, leaving the newly cloned 200GB PATA in primary IDE. Now try a manual clone from USB drive to primary IDE (hoping the original clone to SATA drive, ignoring the errors, produced a decent enough image.) This time it took just over an hour. Plugged in the new IDE drive and booted up: Saved by the bell! Everything’s back!

The lesson for me is: do as I say and backup! Tonight I’m putting the 320GB SATA into hot swap bay and backing up all my crap.

Posted in storage, hardware, backup | 1 Comment »