Vocal Voices

Why you don't play around with things inside a PC when it is switched on...

One of my 3TB drives in my VMWare server is playing up. It starts up and then fails about 5 minutes into trying to copy stuff off it. As I have 4x 3TB drives in there, I have a problem as some of the data is unique due to the fact that I have not managed to sync with home in the last year... Which is irritating, if not actually fatal.

So in trying to diagnose the issue, I was unplugging running drives and seeing which one became unavailable on the server. Finally I got to the drive which was faulty (no drive went unavailable when I unplugged it).

I'm used to pulling drives out of the machine whilst it's running. but this machine is so stuffed full of drives that I have two of them in the top with 5.25 adapters on them. Whilst taking the drive out there was a small spark on the motherboard as the adapter case touched the board. Which is now dead as a dodo.

So my drama, which has caused me to buy two new 4TB drives at nearly £200 became a crisis requiring a new motherboard, of which I have bought two because my home desktop is having issues which this will probably fix.

Of course now I really need to get the drives out of the case before I rebuild it and extract all the data offline before rebuilding it. So anther £90 for a 4x docking station which will allow me to build a new virtual server, copy the data off to my new shiny drives. I can then reconfigure 2 of the 4 drives, plus some others I have lying around for Windows and copy the data back again. Then I can clean my shiny new drives and put them, with the other 2 3TB drives, back in my server and I can spend most of next week copying the data back again....

This has been a rather painful process, exacerbated by my rather cavalier attitude to my own running systems (I don't do this with other people's systems).

So a timely reminder not to fiddle inside boxes full of sensitive electronics whilst it is powered on.....

Now I really need to get that job I'm interviewing for tomorrow. It will be €50 to €100 a day more. I'll have paid for the hardware and new suit by the end of the first month.... Of course if I don't, I'll be even more out of pocket........

Note to self. Next time engage brain before wielding screwdriver....

OK in the end I'll have a faster, newer system which is less likely to fail and less likely to give me problems and my machine at home will work and not crash every 6 weeks or so and my USB 3.0 on my workstation at home will be working again.

But still. It is expense at a time I really don't need it....

Note to self. Next time engage brain before wielding screwdriver....

I must say, I always try to engage brain before wielding screwdriver. And brain invariably says "just put screwdriver down, then walk away, slowly and carefully" .....

I usually find that leaving things alone works pretty well. Time is a great healer.

And as a Mech Eng I am happier with a hammer and spanner than a screwdriver. Anyone can use a screwdriver, it takes skill to wield hammer and a spanner.

My best Christmas pressie was a toolkit with all of the above . If you don't turn the machine off, how are you supposed to know when you get to the faulty drive? .

We use a backup solution that goes via Internet to my fils PC. It's Not syncing though, which I see is what your wanting to achieve.

The problem was that the faulty drive always restarted and reset as "normal". Only failing again under use. I'd done that 4 times. So my only option was to disconnect one by one until I found the drive.

I should then have powered it off and dismantled it, but because I had a virtual machine stuck in limbo and the fact that I had to physically power the whole box off earlier in the day, I decided to take the drive out and try to force a restart from the software.... Much good that did.

I suspect it's failed due to the heat, it's been pretty hot here.

WM, when in the Army I found a 14lb sledge with a broken handle which had been abandoned. So I took a saw to the handle and cut it down so that it would fit to my elbow when I grasped the handle right by the head. I could then crawl under recalcitrant things and "persuade" them to come apart. Skill indeed...

Now I'm waiting for parts to arrive from Germany (faster than the UK although more expensive for the same stuff), when it arrives I'll start the rebuild work.

I've just used a hammer and chisel on Mrs A's Tablet and completely wrecked it (on purpose).
It was a cheap un-named Chinese one we bought on the Internet and it finally gave up the ghost.
We have had no end of trouble with it, and it finally would only converse with us in Chinese.
It gave me great pleasure in brutally destroying it. We'll see tomorrow what John Lewis has.

Hmmm,

Frustration apart, there is a keystroke combination to reset them to factory default......

However I Totally associate with the "Revenge of the frustrated" approach......

My hard drives have arrived. The docking station is now with DPD for the weekend (I swear they do it deliberately to try and get the weekend rate) and the motherboards are in transit delivery date and time indeterminate.

So my weekend free to fix the mess will be a boring one with limited entertainment and a dead PC ornament on the coffee table..…

Suff wrote:Hmmm,

Frustration apart, there is a keystroke combination to reset them to factory default......

:

Actually I did reset it to factory default. That's when it reverted to Chinese.

We've been to John Lewis this afternoon and bought a new Lenovo Touch "two-in-one convertible".

The Lenovo's look very good. However I can't justify the need. I already have several desktop machines, one Laptop of extreme power, a netbook, two smart phones and recently a cheap android tablet.

I believe that the tesco Hudl2 represents some of the best value you can get in the UK for a cheap droid tablet. Unfortunately I was never in the UK with pay at a Tesco which had one in stock.....