Equipment failure
Yesterday, I bought an external hard drive case for the 300mb drive I had sitting around. I’d originally bought the drive for an NAS, but couldn’t find one that wasn’t crap, so I got a plain old USB external case instead. The server box is always on, so why not? I’ve been backing the desktop machine up to the server, but I didn’t have anywhere to back the server up to except itself. I’ve been growing increasingly uncomfortable with that.
“Something” happened during installation and it screwed up my system. After reboot, services weren’t started. Services like “server” and other things that are sort of necessary. I tried to start them manually and they’d shut down immediately. I tried to start “Windows Firewall and Connection Sharing” service, and got “Error 5: Access denied”. WTF? This was also after starting Nero (a DVD burning program) and it said “Your executable has been altered. You may have a virus.” Well, I don’t have a virus, of that I’m certain. My Czech protection is fantastic, I recommend it to everyone. But since the services wouldn’t start, there was no network. The server could access the internet, but the internet couldn’t access the server. Not good. I’ve got work to do, and it is my production machine after all.
Well, I turned it off overnight, and it seems to be working okay this morning. All the proper connections have been restarted and I was able to back up the system. Now I’m seeing tons and tons of errors in the system logs. Controller parity error on \Harddisk0\D. I don’t like the sound of that.
So I’m kicking off a scandisk and going for a bike ride. It’s a holiday after all.
Update:
Scandisk showed no disk errors, but I’m still getting controller errors. These are the two errors I’m getting:
If it really is a cable, I’m happy about that. I’ll take it apart tonight and reseat the cable and see if that makes a difference. It just so happens, I have a spare as well.
I seem to also be getting a lot of Warning 51’s.
November 10th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Yeow, that’s not good. Hopefully all you did was temporarily confuse the disk controllers and scandisk helps makes more sense out of things.
P.S. Holiday for you maybe. At least my commute was less crowded this morning.
November 10th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
What do you mean “confuse the disk controllers?” Confuse them how?
I looked at the error logs and there are controller parity errors going back as far as the log exists (last July). They seem to be increasing in number, though. That doesn’t make me feel too comfortable. I’m not quite sure what to do. Scandisk is still running. I’m really hoping there’s a bad sector on the disk, possibly the Nero location, but that doesn’t really explain why there are so many errors. I use Nero almost never. And I have doubts as to whether a bad disk sector would show up as a controller parity error.
There are also a lot of warnings saying something about an error on paging. I’m a bit confused about what that means as well. To me “paging” means system paging, but AFAICT, it’s complaining about the D drive. The paging files are on the C drive, I don’t think thereare any on the D drive. Unless “paging” here just means block transfer or something.
At least I have everything backed up now.
November 10th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
I was thinking that perhaps the introduction of a new drive to a running controller might lead it to confuse the new drive as one of the already installed ones. Like a messed up hot swap or something. Then you rebooted, and it straightened itself out again. Obviously that should never happen, but then again…
But if the errors go back to last July, that’s a different story. Is the server running RAID with parity? Perhaps there’s a problem with one of the disks in the array, but the controller is smart enough to keep things running, logging the errors in the meantime. Scandisk should be able to notice that one…
/half blind, grasping at straws
November 10th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Ah, no. The new drive is an external USB drive, it doesn’t go through the controller, I don’t think.
I finally got the MS page about the errors. They both say “bad cable”, so I’ll start with that. Am I right in thinking there’s a single controller for both drives? I’m getting errors about the D drive, I think (assuming that’s what \Harddisk0\D means).
The errors go back to last july, but I think the logs truncate then. The errors probably go beyond that as well.
November 10th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Well, I reseated the cables. We’ll see if that does anything. I was going to just replace the cable, but when I got the box open, it turns out these are SATA drives, not IDE/ATA and all I have is an IDE cables. Those SATA cables are pretty heavy duty things. It’s hard to see how they’d fail. But in any case, they’re not terribly expensive.
Rebooted at 4:33 pm. We’ll see what the logs have to say.
November 11th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
I’m pretty sure that Error 51 has something to do with Area 51. Of course, due to the massive government cover-up I can’t substantiate this theory.
November 11th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
You should never have mentioned that on a public website. Your name is now on The List.
November 11th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
I believe I was already on ‘The List’.
Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me!