Good and Bad, and some hardware questions for the masses...

[hippybngstockng]

Good-New Modem!
Bad-As much of a doorstop as the last modem, seems like- Internet in 3 minute bursts followed by 11 minutes of trying to get Internet back.
Good-Mom taking K for the weekend!
Bad-Still too broke to do a damn thing about that other than sit around kid-free. yay.
Good-Shredded 4 boxes of papers!
Bad-Still not finding my birth certificate, or the original pretty copy of our marriage license.
Good-Have a new copy of license, and my mom can probably get a copy of the BC from the hospital I was born in (near her place) and they have to give it to her since she's my mom!
Bad-Still have to do about nine other really important things about the paperwork, many of which cost significant cash which we still don't have.
Good-Not dead
Bad-Teeth rotting, remaining sane costs a lot of money


And a random hardware question for you hardcore geeks out there... We had this problem which just became a recurring problem. Our last big hard drive slowly died as some of you may recall. I think I might have written about how sometimes when we would turn on the machine we'd get "the bad noise", a kind of grinding beep that no computer user likes to hear, followed by the screen informing us that no primary master drive was found. Shutting the machine off before it got to the next step of trying to actually start windows and letting it sit a few extra seconds usually helped the problem. We thought it was the hard drive because it got worse over time, until it finally started giving us the "HOLY GODS, YOU KNOW YOU HAVE A DRIVE HERE THAT'S TOTALLY OOZING BODILY FLUIDS, RIGHT????" message. So we broke down and shelled out the cash and got a new hard drive, la dee da, problem solved, right? RIGHT? Of course Wrong or I wouldn't have said it's become a recurring problem.

Three days ago we started getting The Bad Noise (tm) again, this time with our still rather new hard drive. This time it seems to be advancing at a slightly higher rate, and we have a lot more data at stake and CANNOT afford to replace the hard drive, unh uh, no way, no sire. Also, clearly it's not the hard drives, it's something doing this TO the hard drives, right? We can't for the lives of us figure out what, since just about every other piece of hardware except possibly the motherboard has been replaced, if not that too... Is it something about or mojo? Has this ever happened to any of you before?

Comments

[insaint.livejournal.com]

Hrm. I haven't had that happen, no. My suggestion would be to make assloads of backups and see if you can get your hands on an external drive enclosure, so you can use the drive through that for the time being. This isn't a solution, obviously, but at least it should protect the data somewhat while you guys are figuring it out.

[insaint.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. And would you like to take a look at the bike? I think it would be too small for uniquecrash5, though, but even so.

[hippybngstockng.livejournal.com]

Maybe so? We need to drive a lot today, so it would be tomorrow at the earliest.

[insaint.livejournal.com]

Aside from today, I'm busy till Saturday night/Sunday.

But! If your driving takes you past lovecraftienne's, you can take a look at it yourselves. It's chained up at the back of the building, on the left side of the bike rack if you're facing the door. It's red and silver... the seat's red and black.

If it's still there, etc. And if you don't get a chance to look at it, we can try to find another time for me to take you there.

[tygerdsebat.livejournal.com]

It is *possible* that you bought a bad drive...Is it still under warranty?

[hippybngstockng.livejournal.com]

oh no, in our book "new" is defined as "not gotten used and is less than 4 years old". So "new" but not likely to be under warranty, but really should not be standing on the doorstep of hell either. :P It's just the uncanny nature of the problem being so identical that makes me doubt it's been the drive both times. What would you say the average life expectancy of a hard drive is anyway?

[insaint.livejournal.com]

Depends on the drive... I've never had any drives fail (*knocks on wood*), but I know people who've lost drive after drive... It's kind of hit or miss, really.

[tygerdsebat.livejournal.com]

It really depends on a lot of factors, I mean, it's got moving parts so it's *going* to fail :P

Some drives are known for high failure rates (used to be maxtors in the late 90's and early 2000s), the IBM Deskstar was affectionately known as the "deathstar" and we recently lost one of these at home.

Really there's only a few ways for a drive to fail, and usually it makes noises on it's way out.

This noise you're mentioning? Is it coming from the drive itself, or is this the windows/hardware "boot up failure" type of beep coming from the pcspeaker?

What OS are you running?

I'd almost lean toward IDE failure (where the drive connects to the mother board) over drive failure if the beep is coming from the computer and not a noise on the drive itself.

I've always been better at diagnosing problems in person than in writing or by phone... :P

Re: possibilities

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

*blink*

For a second I thought I'd commented here.

[ajpurkiss.livejournal.com]

Hardware really is not my thing having just managed to take three attempts to update the RAM correctly in a work machine (how was I meant to know it was VERY picky about the slots you used)....

Out of interest is the HD in a place where it takes a lot of knocks ? Could it be it has been knocked about while running?

Other then that you could probably try that place mentioned in the comments a few posts back about bikes to see if they can fix it. Maybe they - or some other kind soul can do a data transfer for you at minimal cost ?