Computer mess, indeed
May. 1st, 2008 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shalannaHave you ever seen this error message?
Well, it wasn't OK at all, but I had to click to close the dialog box. Then it said:
"The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block." *OK*
Where is the *HELL NO IT AIN'T OK* button?!
There were a number of those bad-block messages.
*sigh* This explains so much. (And I just thought it was the Beltane gremlin welcoming the holiday.)
The other day the system couldn't do a delayed write to my external drive and it showed a bunch of empty folders (no files in there), and then a "flush of buffer" failed, so I suspected something was going on. Actually, I panicked. Shut down and came back up to find that the external drive files were there--it was just this computer that had lost the directory info. Glad it couldn't write it! (Why would it try to write the directory file when I hadn't changed any files?) Last week when I tried to save a Notepad file it told me that the file naming utility had failed to allocate a filename and it couldn't save. Eudora has crashed with illegal access errors. Explorer would freeze up. And now when I click on certain files, they're corrupt and can't be shown in IrfanView (mostly they're picture files, so far, except for ONE text file that I already restored from backup twice and it got corrupt right away, implying that it was saved in the same bad sector spot. Or maybe the computer just doesn't like the title "Appolonian VS Dionysian.")
Anyway, I started dragging my stuff to be backed up on the external hard disk. Hooray for those! And I backed up to the iPod (synced the iPod).
But! If/when the inevitable happens (and I just can't relax and enjoy it--I have to sit here until Hubster has the weekend free to replace this drive with the one that was too big to work in the TiVo, but yay that we already own it), will my iTunes library come back when I restore from iPod? I know I'll have to reinstall from this CD titled "iTunes and iPod," and then I'll have to wait 200 years while Apple Update goes and gets a new version and installs it. But then I can sync my iPod and recover all those music files, can't I? (Another 300 years.) Because if NOT, let me know unless you hate me, and I can drag them to other drives. I have a LOT of stuff I bought from iTunes (shame), Amazon MP3s, eMusic, and even the evil, wicked, eeevil Rhapsody Music (who had to finally be dissuaded from charging my credit card account via a three-way convo with a Wells Fargo Bank rep--they followed me to the new card number even after it was closed! Incredible! And all for $12 or so a month!) I guess I could start writing CDs from iTunes.
I finally found out how to see the CHKDSK results and all the error/warning messages the system generates. (The nerd/IT support/system programmer's wife who is also a software weenie is of course the last to know about this useful tool.) Open the Control Panel and run Event Viewer (under Administrative Tools.) Yikes! There will be a lot of stuff that doesn't really matter, but if you see those "the driver has predicted this disk will fail imminently" things, go get a drive.
I don't understand why bit-by-bit mirror copying wouldn't work if it skipped the bad sectors . . . and then I could avoid reinstalling Windows XP, Office, iTunes, and everything else, and configuring it again (I use large fonts and make a few other accommodations.) Stabbity-stab! Do not want! *siiigh* However, this sure beats the Old Way. In the olden days of early personal computing, you just heard a sickening grinding noise one fine morning, and then your data all went bye-bye. Or the magic smoke came out of the motherboard and the disk controller was part of that board, so you couldn't recover your data. Bad stuff like that. It is painful to recall.
*So* you should go look at that event viewer from time to time just to see what's happening. Very illuminating.
*aarghh* I hate reinstalling stuff. Hate hatey hate.
However, it WILL get rid of all that junk I've accumulated over the years. I don't really use all the stuff I tried out. Basically, I only use the OS and various accessories (including some shareware antivirus thing that works pretty well), MS-Office, IE, iTunes (and occasionally other media players like WinAmp and QuickTime and that FLV player and so on), IrfanView (which I just discovered--it's great for looking at images), and Cute FTP. I occasionally use that utility to extract text from PDF files, but I can't remember what it was called or find it in the Start menu, so whatever. I don't really need all those things I tried out. NoteWorthy Composer was a lot of work just to notate a couple of lines. All those other utilities, meh.
Here's what I have the most trouble remembering: when I edit or create a file, I have to do it to the "stick." (I unplugged the external hard drive after copying stuff over, as those "delayed write failed" messages kept popping up, and I couldn't risk having the crazy system overwrite the good stuff on the drive.) Don't want to create any new content on the failing drive. I'm saving e-mail off to a special mailbox that I'll copy to the stick when I take a break. Whew! Hassle! But glad these options are available. In those dark days of yore, one simply sat and sobbed in antici . . . (SAY IT) . . . pation of the impending crash. (Unless one had a tape backup system, but that was pretty slow and might still not get the data in time. Diskettes and swapping them in and out was a hopeless and futile effort, for the most part. Yikes, how did we ever cope?!)
If anyone knows about that iPod/iTunes library thing, let me know. . . .
"The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent." *OK*
Well, it wasn't OK at all, but I had to click to close the dialog box. Then it said:
"The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block." *OK*
Where is the *HELL NO IT AIN'T OK* button?!
There were a number of those bad-block messages.
*sigh* This explains so much. (And I just thought it was the Beltane gremlin welcoming the holiday.)
The other day the system couldn't do a delayed write to my external drive and it showed a bunch of empty folders (no files in there), and then a "flush of buffer" failed, so I suspected something was going on. Actually, I panicked. Shut down and came back up to find that the external drive files were there--it was just this computer that had lost the directory info. Glad it couldn't write it! (Why would it try to write the directory file when I hadn't changed any files?) Last week when I tried to save a Notepad file it told me that the file naming utility had failed to allocate a filename and it couldn't save. Eudora has crashed with illegal access errors. Explorer would freeze up. And now when I click on certain files, they're corrupt and can't be shown in IrfanView (mostly they're picture files, so far, except for ONE text file that I already restored from backup twice and it got corrupt right away, implying that it was saved in the same bad sector spot. Or maybe the computer just doesn't like the title "Appolonian VS Dionysian.")
Anyway, I started dragging my stuff to be backed up on the external hard disk. Hooray for those! And I backed up to the iPod (synced the iPod).
But! If/when the inevitable happens (and I just can't relax and enjoy it--I have to sit here until Hubster has the weekend free to replace this drive with the one that was too big to work in the TiVo, but yay that we already own it), will my iTunes library come back when I restore from iPod? I know I'll have to reinstall from this CD titled "iTunes and iPod," and then I'll have to wait 200 years while Apple Update goes and gets a new version and installs it. But then I can sync my iPod and recover all those music files, can't I? (Another 300 years.) Because if NOT, let me know unless you hate me, and I can drag them to other drives. I have a LOT of stuff I bought from iTunes (shame), Amazon MP3s, eMusic, and even the evil, wicked, eeevil Rhapsody Music (who had to finally be dissuaded from charging my credit card account via a three-way convo with a Wells Fargo Bank rep--they followed me to the new card number even after it was closed! Incredible! And all for $12 or so a month!) I guess I could start writing CDs from iTunes.
I finally found out how to see the CHKDSK results and all the error/warning messages the system generates. (The nerd/IT support/system programmer's wife who is also a software weenie is of course the last to know about this useful tool.) Open the Control Panel and run Event Viewer (under Administrative Tools.) Yikes! There will be a lot of stuff that doesn't really matter, but if you see those "the driver has predicted this disk will fail imminently" things, go get a drive.
I don't understand why bit-by-bit mirror copying wouldn't work if it skipped the bad sectors . . . and then I could avoid reinstalling Windows XP, Office, iTunes, and everything else, and configuring it again (I use large fonts and make a few other accommodations.) Stabbity-stab! Do not want! *siiigh* However, this sure beats the Old Way. In the olden days of early personal computing, you just heard a sickening grinding noise one fine morning, and then your data all went bye-bye. Or the magic smoke came out of the motherboard and the disk controller was part of that board, so you couldn't recover your data. Bad stuff like that. It is painful to recall.
*So* you should go look at that event viewer from time to time just to see what's happening. Very illuminating.
*aarghh* I hate reinstalling stuff. Hate hatey hate.
However, it WILL get rid of all that junk I've accumulated over the years. I don't really use all the stuff I tried out. Basically, I only use the OS and various accessories (including some shareware antivirus thing that works pretty well), MS-Office, IE, iTunes (and occasionally other media players like WinAmp and QuickTime and that FLV player and so on), IrfanView (which I just discovered--it's great for looking at images), and Cute FTP. I occasionally use that utility to extract text from PDF files, but I can't remember what it was called or find it in the Start menu, so whatever. I don't really need all those things I tried out. NoteWorthy Composer was a lot of work just to notate a couple of lines. All those other utilities, meh.
Here's what I have the most trouble remembering: when I edit or create a file, I have to do it to the "stick." (I unplugged the external hard drive after copying stuff over, as those "delayed write failed" messages kept popping up, and I couldn't risk having the crazy system overwrite the good stuff on the drive.) Don't want to create any new content on the failing drive. I'm saving e-mail off to a special mailbox that I'll copy to the stick when I take a break. Whew! Hassle! But glad these options are available. In those dark days of yore, one simply sat and sobbed in antici . . . (SAY IT) . . . pation of the impending crash. (Unless one had a tape backup system, but that was pretty slow and might still not get the data in time. Diskettes and swapping them in and out was a hopeless and futile effort, for the most part. Yikes, how did we ever cope?!)
If anyone knows about that iPod/iTunes library thing, let me know. . . .
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-01 06:47 pm (UTC)I'm convinced that computers do this purging thing every once in a while just to get us to clean up our drives. Heaven knows we'd never get around to it otherwise! Just the other day at my day-job, I issued a command that wiped out a multi-terrabyte drive. It wasn't me who hosed the thing, actually. It was just me and my little command who found it. No recovery possible this time. C'est la vie, shit happens, and all that jazz. Not much you can do. I'm glad you'll be able to rescue most of your stuff, even if it is a royal pain in the patootie.
I'd forgotten it was Beltane... Perhaps I'm the one who attracted the gremlin today. Might explain a few things!
no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-02 03:36 am (UTC)Good luck, though.
As for your use of "antici . . . (SAY IT) . . . pation," my older daughter, who works in the Mathematics and Statistics Department of the nearby state university, said one of the professors there used that in class and got a bunch of blank looks.
A whole new crop of virgins . . .
Bwahaha.