This has been a week of great wailing and gnashing of teeth in terms of computer maintenance here in the Amy & Jeff household.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Amy\u2019s computer had the oldest hard drive in the house, so it was due to fail soon. We decided to be proactive about it. We ordered a new hard drive (and since it was SATA, a controller card to match). The basic idea was good, and it was an excellent opportunity to do a fresh OS install. That\u2019s all great as a basic idea<\/em>, but I\u2019ve never had a machine fight me so hard on the way up. Short story: Roxio can bite me. For some unknown reason, the computer started throwing a blue screen on every shutdown after I installed Easy CD & DVD creator. It took about 3 installs and a hardware swap to be sure it was the software and not the driver for the new SATA controller. Once I figured that out, I was able to switch to Nero, and the install went great\u2026 right up until I moved the computer back to Amy\u2019s desk. Zap. The new SATA controller started locking up at boot. No problem, I just installed the other<\/em> new one I bought to check to see if it was the culprit in the previous<\/em> problem. The card worked great, but Windows didn\u2019t have the driver, so it wouldn\u2019t boot. Another re-install. Thankfully, it\u2019s now all finally working. Next, I get to RMA the first SATA controller to get some money back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While I was working on her computer, Amy was using my iBook a lot. She kept having problems with lockups. It finally got to the point where sometimes when she tried to reboot, it gave her the dreaded \u201cflashing question mark\u201d symbol. Mind you, I was in the other room fighting her PC while this was going on. When I finally got around to taking a look at the iBook, I figured out that when the lockups and boot failures happened, there was a mysterious lack of spindle motor sound from the hard drive. I knew it was going to happen eventually<\/em>, but did it have to be this<\/strong><\/em> week? I spent this afternoon digging the iBook open (no small feat) to make sure I could extract the hard drive. At least I was able to do it. A new drive has been ordered. Once it arrives, I get to install it, reassemble the laptop, and then reinstall OS X.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the middle of all of this, the server reported during one of its nightly surface scans that one of the drives in the RAID failed a self-test. One of the almost NEW drives in the RAID. So, I took the server down, inserted the emergency SOHO router so that the one working computer<\/em><\/strong> could have net access, and ran a few detailed scans on the drive. Nothing. I put it back in service, and it\u2019s been working fine since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, for anyone that\u2019s been wondering, that\u2019s where I\u2019ve been this last week. This coming week: the much overdue task of mowing the yard. *grumble*<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This has been a week of great wailing and gnashing of teeth in terms of computer maintenance here in the Amy & Jeff household.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,3],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-geekiness","tag-life-eventsnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1679,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/1679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}