So my old XP computer is doing a major fade. Over the weekend I had Norton File Protection encounter a problem and crash, well hurrah. The main drive was down to 3 gigs, and the computer seemed sluggish, so I moved or deleted stuff that freed up 36 gigs, but Norton was being a pain in the ass and holding on to all of it for it’s undelete. I really hated the protected recycle bin, but it saved me once so I was always hesitant to turn it off. I tried to empty the protected files, and it just froze up explorer. So then I tried turning it off from the Norton config screen, and trying to get there froze up norton, ah crap. I tried to manually restart the service, but it didn’t seem to like that either, so I resolved to reboot. As it shut down and then again while it was loading, I thought it was taking a very long time. And then when it was up again, it still felt sluggish, even after waiting for the inevitable startup crap to finish up. Process explorer showed that the Interrupts pseudo-task was doing little spikes here and there, 1% here, and then maybe a minute later, jump up to 20% for a second, then back down to nothing again for a while. I immediately felt uneasy… something was up, I knew it didn’t normally do that. But I left it for a bit thinking maybe I missed it before.
During the week, it occurred to me why windows might be slow and why interrupts would be running. Something I had read about a few years ago somehow bubbled to the top, PIO transfer mode. See, device data transfer is too annoying for a CPU to usually get involved, it’s too slow, so it gets tossed off to dedicated handlers to do it behind the CPU’s back, and it’s called DMA. There are increasing levels for DMA, higher is better, and faster. Normally these are set to take the best mode available for the device and the cabling. Now, the thing I had read about was how Windows could be mean to you if you had a scratched CD or a flaky hard drive. As the operating system encounters errors from the device for those reasons (especially bad for a simple scratched CD or DVD), it steps down through the access methods until it hits the lowest level, PIO, where the CPU does the heavy lifting. Now, that’s nice and all, especially with a flaky device, keeps it alive. But windows keeps (or perhaps kept, not sure if this changed) the value forever. So one bad CD and ruin your drive essentially, by dumming it down to PIO. It can be changed, but not really easily, you can’t just tell it to be good again, you need to jump through a couple hoops.
Unfortunately, my hard drive was set to this PIO mode, so it was slow as a river of bricks. Now, I started looking up how to reset it to its former glory, but checking the event log showed me why it was dropped to PIO at all.
Warning:An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.
Error:The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.
What? What the hell now… are you kidding? Oh dear god no…. more digital fire. And searching for these terms is no help, I found tonnes of people all asking each other if they knew what it meant, and usually the symptoms were accompanied by freezing or occasional failure to boot. Yeah, it looked bad, and the options here were no good at all. The drive could be failing… the drive controller could be failing… the motherboard could be failing. About the only non-disastrous cause was perhaps the IDE cable was screwed up. But given the age of the drive, I think it really could be dying outright. Even the secondary hard disk in the computer was getting reports of errors and a status of Healthy (At Risk) from the Disc Management snap-in, so both were heading downhill. I did entertain myself a bit trying to see if maybe it was that drive that was set to PIO and was causing all the fuss, but according to XP, Device 0 on IDE chain 0 was set to PIO, while all the others were set to high DMA levels. And even at PIO, more errors were being added to the log. There was never a problem that windows directly reported, so I guess the drive eventually responded. But I was waiting for it to just bluescreen on me at any minute, so I spent hours into the night copying, very very slowly, everything I could think of from the two internal drives to my external drives. Trouble is that stuff is everywhere, and I had to hunt around a bit.
Now I think I’ve copied everything I can, so I’ve shut down the dear old XP box. I’ll only start it again if I remember something I needed to salvage, or when I start to tinker with it. I’ll try to figure out what’s wrong with it, I mean, there seem to be several things, since when it did the hard fails with bluescreens before, I was checking the event logs a lot and hadn’t seen the hard drive related errors then, so this appears to be relatively new.
The other other thing that’s done this is one of the external drives I have, where occasionally it just dies, windows claims it can’t see anything on it, 0 bytes, but the drive is there. Also can’t safely remove it despite nothing having an open handle to it, but cycling the hard drive power makes it come back, and apparently, with no ill effect. I think I’ll need to replace that one too, but I put low priority stuff on it anyway. I was nearly going to buy a NAS recently too, with dual 1-TB drives for it, on Raid-1, but I can’t justify the expense to myself right now, proping up the economy be damned. I looked up Drobo first actually, it sounded like a neat device at the time, but it is hella expensive, no discs with it, and only recently got Network-connectivity at huge expense, so I don’t think I can go for that one either.
When my parents computer exploded when I touched it, and when we surmised (though it has not yet been confirmed) that it was due to a hard drive failure, I thought to myself, I haven’t really had a hard drive fail. Well, I had one that occasionally threw out CRC warnings, but it lasted a good long time and I replaced it with another one for capacity reasons. But I hadn’t had a big one. I thought I was due, but not this soon. I suppose I’m lucky in that I had the chance to back stuff up.
Anyone got some DAT’s they don’t need anymore… and a backup server to write to them?
