Post #158,071
6/2/04 8:48:48 AM
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And now this...
Came home last night, turned on my main PC, the one that has 17 years of my PC life history on it, connect to the Internet and try to use WS_FTP LE to download some more comedy radio. Site is maxed out on allowed number of users, so I come back every 5 minutes or so to try again. After about an hour of unsuccessful attempts, the machine doesn't seem to respond: can't see the mouse pointer move. I figure that the app locked up, so I try the 3 finger salute to kill it under Task Manager. Nothing happens. "That's curious..." So hit the reset button.
Black screen with the words "Operating System not found" is displayed.
SHIT!
Break out a Win98 book disk, reboot. Displays a message about the File Allocation Table being hosed. "That sucks". I can see the hard drive and the 3 partitions on it. I can see my original HD, now used as a backup storage device for my data files and MOST applications, especially those that I've written myself over the years. But it can't see the C:\\WINDOWS folder at all. So now I figure I got nailed by a virus/trojan/worm, and it must be a doozy to get past the firewall on the Linksys router and Zone Alarm firewall.
Called Spiceware after I discover that the box containing many of my old DOS books and utility software was one of the ones the movers lost 18 months ago. He jogged my memory on how to run some of the old DOS commands and how to tweak a boot disk. Finally get SCANDISK up and running, spend a few hours pressing "F" to fix the bad files that it finds. Let it run overnight as it frees up space and does a surface scan.
Wake up this morning, SCANISK is complete, but saying that there are directories/files that it couldn't recover. I hit the reset button and go take a shower. 15 minutes later I return to see that it's still trying to bring up Windows. Fuck it. Turned it off and went to work.
This really pisses me off since this is a 40 gig Maxtor that's less than 2 years old and gave NO warning about any potential problems whatsoever. What's worse is that I didn't kick it, bump into it, even fart in its general direction; it just sat there running and then decided to flake out. Naturally, my last full "backup" (copying files to a CD-R) was late April, so I'll lose at least a month's worth of whatever I did recently, including emails and changes in the Address book.
My next step is to go buy a 40 gig Western Digital on sale at Circuit City, set that up as a new primary, and see if I can copy over the files from the Maxtor. Unless, of course, the intelligent hordes of IWETHEY can offer better advice.
As a last resort, has anybody ever heard good/bad opinions about the data recovery services?
lincoln
"Windows XP has so many holes in its security that any reasonable user will conclude it was designed by the same German officer who created the prison compound in "Hogan's Heroes." - Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
[link|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net|contact me]
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Post #158,073
6/2/04 8:56:01 AM
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Mirrored drives.
RAID 0.
RAID 5.
Nightly backups.
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
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Post #158,092
6/2/04 10:59:04 AM
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Links on how to set one up?
Any and all knowledge will be appreciated.
lincoln
"Windows XP has so many holes in its security that any reasonable user will conclude it was designed by the same German officer who created the prison compound in "Hogan's Heroes." - Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
[link|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net|contact me]
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Post #158,097
6/2/04 11:14:12 AM
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For Win98?
Iffn' you're going to be using Win98, you won't be able to do this from within the OS itself. You'll have to get one of those fancy-schmancy RAID controllers.
[link|http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-115-002&depa=1|http://www.newegg.co...16-115-002&depa=1]
Try this one, reviews seem pretty good. The way it works is you buy 4 or 8 hard drives, attach all to the card. When you boot the machine, it gives you an additional option during the POST sequence to enter the controller's BIOS. From there, you have a whole host of options to follow through, that reconfigure those hard drives to be one "big" drive. As far as Windows 98 goes, it thinks you just have one giant hard drive, with parity bits. If a drive fails, you replace the drive, and the RAID system restores the data from the parity bits on to that drive.
If you're excessively paranoid, do a 4-way mirror. :)
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
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Post #158,123
6/2/04 1:07:20 PM
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Screw Win98
If your forced to use Windows get XP Pro and use IDE disk mirroring. You attach one disk to the primary and one to the secondary interface. It works great, and occasionally you can break the mirror and back up the inactive drive without any interference from open files.
-drl
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Post #158,139
6/2/04 2:37:38 PM
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Can't
XP would require a whole new box - this is a PII 400, and mt wife says 6 PCs in the house is enough already.
lincoln
"Windows XP has so many holes in its security that any reasonable user will conclude it was designed by the same German officer who created the prison compound in "Hogan's Heroes." - Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
[link|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net|contact me]
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Post #158,143
6/2/04 2:53:56 PM
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That problem is easily enough solved...
Arrange for some of the existing computers to have strategically timed "accidents". Then say that you obviously need a new computer or 3. :-D
Cheers,
Ben
To deny the indirect purchaser, who in this case is the ultimate purchaser, the right to seek relief from unlawful conduct, would essentially remove the word consumer from the Consumer Protection Act
- [link|http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1246&Page=1&pagePos=20|Nebraska Supreme Court]
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Post #158,254
6/3/04 11:52:48 AM
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But the solution will force me to abandon
many programs that I've acquired over the years that ran on pre-Win 98 operating systems: I've tested some on my work laptop running XP Pro and they won't work properly or at all. I'm not going to give up years of data that's locked inside freeware/shareware program files that never followed Microsoft's "upgrade path" or were purchased from companies that are no longer in existence.
And I still want to salvage the data files from the drive if that's possible.
lincoln
"Windows XP has so many holes in its security that any reasonable user will conclude it was designed by the same German officer who created the prison compound in "Hogan's Heroes." - Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
[link|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net|contact me]
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Post #158,264
6/3/04 12:28:34 PM
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But many of those program run just fine under DOSEMU or
other emulators in Linux distributions.
--
[link|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net|greg],
[link|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ iwethey
I've decided to become a perfectionist.
That way I'll have more reasons to hate people.
Your recycled electrons annoy me. Please use new electrons.
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Post #158,280
6/3/04 2:40:20 PM
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What will you do if THOSE machines crash?
You should work out your upgrade path sooner rather than later.
Cheers,
Ben
To deny the indirect purchaser, who in this case is the ultimate purchaser, the right to seek relief from unlawful conduct, would essentially remove the word consumer from the Consumer Protection Act
- [link|http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1246&Page=1&pagePos=20|Nebraska Supreme Court]
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Post #158,144
6/2/04 3:09:12 PM
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Easy to upgrade.
Just replace the mobo and CPU, possibly the RAM. Number of computers stays the same. :-)
Regards,
-scott anderson
"Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
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Post #158,153
6/2/04 3:34:12 PM
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Me?
I just buy components all the time. Sometimes, it turns out, I magically have enough for another machine.
Of course, now I have a problem that I don't wanna cycle my home servers through... as a PII-300 with 512MB would be a horrible overkill of a Firewall machine. And a 900MHz 1.5GB would seems to be WAY overkill for a nfs/music streamer/debian repo/ISO Sanctuary.
I already have an XP2500+ I have not yet cycled through yet. I tested it 2 weeks ago, was the processor in my main machine when the MB blew. It passed with flying colors and no smoke being released.
/me currently has a Duron 850MHz, Thunderbird 900MHz and an XP2500+ laying around doing nothing. Not enough to build a machine... but getting there. I need a good cheap motherboard right now for the 900MHz.
--
[link|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net|greg],
[link|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ iwethey
I've decided to become a perfectionist.
That way I'll have more reasons to hate people.
Your recycled electrons annoy me. Please use new electrons.
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Post #158,205
6/2/04 9:26:43 PM
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Not a problem here . .
. . since we run OS/2 and Linux we get along just fine on stuff I strip out for clients' Windows upgrades.
These days it doesn't even take a new version of Windows. Their computers get bogged down with a few worms and some scumware and they want an "upgrade" and aren't going to be happy until they get one. I've learned from long experience not to fight this - just give them what they want or someone else will.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #158,171
6/2/04 5:44:18 PM
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Well, 2k then
2k runs fine on a PII 300 laptop. Should run well on that machine.
-drl
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Post #158,149
6/2/04 3:31:49 PM
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RAID 0? RAID 1
RAID 0 just stripes across multiple disks giving you better performance but no protection. In fact you'd be better off running the disks separately as one disk failure in a RAID 0 array means your file system is toast.
Even RAID5 isn't fool proof. I had an eight disk RAID5 volume fail several days ago when two disks went kaput witin 45 minutes of each other. Even if a hotspare disk was there to jump in I have my doubts the RAID5 volume would have finished initializing the drive before the second one died. It may even push the second disk to failure sooner with the increased disk activity as the volume is in degraded mode.
lister
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Post #158,170
6/2/04 5:37:57 PM
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Nightly offsite backups.
It's the only way to be (kinda sorta) sure.
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
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Post #158,186
6/2/04 7:34:46 PM
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Re: "offsite"
[link|http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Science/Nuke.html|A handy calculator] for those "offsite" backups, just in case other parties are trying to be sure.
;)
--
Chris Altmann
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Post #158,187
6/2/04 7:44:08 PM
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Where do you find such stuff? And another thing...
Ha! :-/
It reminds me of another thing that needs to be considered when storing valuables [link|http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/arts/27FIRE.html|off-site]. :-(
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #158,188
6/2/04 7:49:10 PM
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Product of a warped imagination, and Google to flesh it out.
--
Chris Altmann
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Post #158,189
6/2/04 8:02:37 PM
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Ah.. an understandable confusion
You meant, off.. this site --> \ufffd
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Post #158,077
6/2/04 9:02:03 AM
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never put anything on a machine that you care about
Thats what a hard copy is for addressbooks and financials. Rent some off site storage for $20 a month and copy to it.
thanx,
bill
Time for Lord Stanley to get a Tan
questions, help? [link|mailto:pappas@catholic.org|email pappas at catholic.org]
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Post #158,087
6/2/04 10:36:24 AM
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Remember all HD are measured in MTBF
One lasts forever, one dies immediately. MTBF = 1/2 forever. ;-j
Backups are for WHEN your HD dies, not IF.
If you value your data, daily backups.
Condolences.
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Post #158,095
6/2/04 11:09:58 AM
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My customers ask how long a hard disk lasts.
I tell them, "On average about 5 years, but that doesn't mean yours won't fail in 10 minutes". I also tell them that the one certainty is that it will fail.
Because hard disks are now tail draggers (the heads actually contacts the disks while running) I expect life to be limited.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #158,124
6/2/04 1:08:12 PM
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What about laptop drives?
It occurs to me I've never experienced a laptop HD failure.
-drl
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Post #158,134
6/2/04 2:06:01 PM
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Question back to you
How long do you usually keep a laptop, and over that time, how long is it in use? Desktops are usually used more hours per day (My unscientic analysis - IOW made up on the spot ;-) )
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Post #158,142
6/2/04 2:49:50 PM
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My main machine is my laptop
So it's in use no less than 9 hours a day. And that's just when I'm at work, which requires 90 minutes on either side where it's not in use. But when I work from home, or on the weekends, it's on 24/7.
And it just came back in January from Toshiba with a new hard drive and processor and mobo.
-YendorMike
[link|http://www.hope-ride.org/|http://www.hope-ride.org/]
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Post #158,154
6/2/04 3:35:52 PM
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Yeah, but NOW... NOW it has a problem
With the Keyboard NOW...
After a mixture of water, sucrose, cornsyrup and cola flavoring accidentally was used to umm "wash" the keyboard.
--
[link|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net|greg],
[link|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ iwethey
I've decided to become a perfectionist.
That way I'll have more reasons to hate people.
Your recycled electrons annoy me. Please use new electrons.
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Post #158,156
6/2/04 3:42:16 PM
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But that ain't got nothin' to do with the HD
...And I really need to get that fixed before the HOPE Ride...
-YendorMike
[link|http://www.hope-ride.org/|http://www.hope-ride.org/]
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Post #158,137
6/2/04 2:19:20 PM
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Two.
And that's just at my current job. One machine just came back from Toshiba today with a replacement...
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
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Post #158,096
6/2/04 11:13:41 AM
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From your description I see no evidence . . .
. . that it is the hard disk that failed. A crashed FAT is generally an operating system failure and can be caused by bad memory.
It is rare for a hard disk to fail without spewing hardware read/write error messages or taking a very very long time to load files (as the error correction circuitry tries to get a good enough read to correct the data).
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #158,101
6/2/04 11:36:18 AM
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My thoughts also. I'd check the power supply too ...
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Post #158,125
6/2/04 1:08:52 PM
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concur
-drl
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Post #158,140
6/2/04 2:41:02 PM
6/2/04 2:43:59 PM
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Don't know how to check DIMMs from DOS
and I only know of one place on this side of town that may have memory that will fit this system anymore. How do I verify if the memory and/or the power supply is the culprit?
I agree that the HD may not have truly "crashed" since I am able to see it and access various folders from a DOS prompt. Is it possible to restore/reload the OS without trashing my existing partitions and wiping out the files within them?
lincoln
"Windows XP has so many holes in its security that any reasonable user will conclude it was designed by the same German officer who created the prison compound in "Hogan's Heroes." - Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
[link|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net|contact me]
Edited by lincoln
June 2, 2004, 02:43:59 PM EDT
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Post #158,141
6/2/04 2:46:20 PM
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MemTest86 and ...
[link|http://www.memtest86.com/|MemTest86] - I've not used it myself.
For the power supply, there are often other indications of problems. E.g. my old 486 would die during the initial BIOS message after painting random numbers of text characters of the message. Swapping the PS out fixed it.
The simplest way to check it is to swap in a new PS. If you don't have one to swap in, then you might get lucky by simply checking the +/-12V, +/-5V lines and seeing if they are in-spec. But usually when PSs die they have problems supplying enough current. It's more difficult to check that (you have to have an ammeter in series in the circuit).
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #158,152
6/2/04 3:33:27 PM
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I've used MemTest86
It seems pretty thorough. Let it do several passes to exercise the memory well.
It's a self-booting floppy.
lister
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Post #158,155
6/2/04 3:36:34 PM
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The newer KNOPPIX CDs have it as a boot option.
--
[link|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net|greg],
[link|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ iwethey
I've decided to become a perfectionist.
That way I'll have more reasons to hate people.
Your recycled electrons annoy me. Please use new electrons.
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Post #158,201
6/2/04 9:07:23 PM
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Actually, everything can be perfectly OK . .
. . and you can still get this sort of problem. The worst nightmare is a power failure just long enough to damage the OS but not long enough to kill it. I've seen that happen a couple of times over the years.
I have carefully examined a couple of cases like yours and found what had happened was a block of data was written to a disk address occupied by the FAT table. Why was it written there? As I've told the clients, "Nobody will ever know".
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #158,238
6/3/04 9:33:34 AM
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So if Win98 crashed and the HD didn't crash
How do I recover from this situation?
Re-install Win98 onto the existing HD? Won't that screw up my existing partitions and lose all of the existing files on them?
Get a fresh 40 gig (currently there's a Western Digital on sale at Circuit City), format it, load Win 98 onto it, set the original drive as a slave and copy whatever I can salvage from it to the new drive?
Other options, please?
lincoln
"Windows XP has so many holes in its security that any reasonable user will conclude it was designed by the same German officer who created the prison compound in "Hogan's Heroes." - Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
[link|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net|contact me]
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Post #158,258
6/3/04 12:11:46 PM
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How I do this.
Windows 98 is much more tolerant on reinstall than 2000 or XP which still use the primitive NT v4.0 installer which screws up most of the time.
If I do not suspect registry damage I'll try to install Win98 over the existing Win98 which will preserve the desktop, start menus and drivers. It it works, great, but if it doesn't fix the problem I have to reinstall fresh, but that still doesn't disturb the partitions or application data.
First boot on a floppy and log to the disk. make a \\WIN98 subdirectory and copy to it all the files in the \\WIN98 subdirectory of your CD, but not any of the subdirectories attached - they're all junk.
Log into the Win98 subdirectory and type SETUP. Leave the boot floppy in until told to remove it. Just walk through the install process step by step.
If I think the registry is blown, I rename user.dat and system.dat to user.rat and system.rat and do the install as above, but then have to install the drivers and major applications. In this case you will need a valid license code. In this case all your applications and their data are still on the disk but the programs won't run (MS Office, for instance) because their registry information is gone. Just reinstall.
If the thing is totally uncooperative I'll rename the Windows directory to Zindows and all the files in it starting with "WIN" to "ZIN" and install into a fresh Windows subdirectory.
After everything is working I can copy selected stuff from the Zindows structure to the Windows structure to recover some stuff (desktop, Start menus, address book, fonts, etc.). If I need to get programs to run that aren't reloadable I'll copy everything from the old Windows directory and \\Windows\\System directory that is not already in the new directories.
In a few cases I've had to rename the "Programs Files" subdirectory and let the install build a new one just to get Windows to boot, then transfer program subdirectories to the new "Program Files" directory one by one until I find the one that prevents Windows from booting (though most of the time I never do find what caused the problem).
If you can't find a CD with the exact version of Windows on your machine, you may have to remove the file WIN.COM (regardless of the directory it's in), and you will need a valid license code for the version you are using. It may also ignore the old registries in this case.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #158,276
6/3/04 2:26:38 PM
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Thanks Andrew
I do have the original Win98 SE install CD that came with the machine. Looks like I have my night all planned out for me tonight. I'll keep the community informed as to my progress (or lack of) tomorrow.
lincoln
"Windows XP has so many holes in its security that any reasonable user will conclude it was designed by the same German officer who created the prison compound in "Hogan's Heroes." - Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
[link|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net|contact me]
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Post #158,104
6/2/04 11:46:55 AM
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Linux + ext3
Maybe not *quite* what you wanted to hear, but it IS a robust solution.
Peter
[link|http://www.debian.org|Shill For Hire]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Blog]
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