 Number 196 - September 1999 |
| Computer Hell | |
| by By Herbert Wong, Jr. Director/Hardware SIG Leader, NOCCC - May 1999 | |
|
Giving up Windows 95 was
the best thing I ever did with a Microsoft operating system. Don't get
me wrong, it is a great platform for playing games. And, it is usually
very easy to install. However, the most stable Windows I have ever used
was NT 3.51 with the Windows 95 shell. What can I say?
Windows NT 4.0 replaced 3.51 on my machine. It set a record. It ran for about one-and-a-half years without reinstallation. There were plenty of application crashes and the rare Blue Screen of Death, but I didn't have to reinstall every six months as I did when using Windows 95, Windows for Workgroups, and Windows 3.1. That is, until recently. I have been going through computer hell. Around Thanksgiving time (1998), my motherboard's secondary IDE port died. I can only use two IDE devices; I opt for two hard disk drives. A CD-ROM and some antique hard disk drives will have to sit on the shelf until I can afford to upgrade and place them into a secondary system. Around February 1999, my Yamaha 4260T SCSI CD-R/RW recorder died. A few CD-R copies didn't read correctly. Then, a couple of CD-Rs could only be read by the recorder and not by another CD-ROM drive. Then, only bad disks were written. A change in behavior in hardware is a warning sign of impending failure. I RMA'd (Return Merchandise Authorization) the drive with the original seller on March 5, 1999. They still haven't returned it after ten weeks, but that's another story. Also in February 1999, I lost two gigabytes of data when my Hewlett-Packard 2 GB fast-SCSI hard disk drive (HDD) died. It was some two years into a five-year warranty. Translate that to mean a warranty is no indication of reliability. The first sign of trouble was the sporadic failure of my file manager to recognize the drive. I didn't recognize it as an impending hard disk drive failure because of the simultaneous SCSI CD-R/RW problems. I had been thinking the problem was a failing SCSI host adapter card (the oldest component in my system). Around March 15, 1999, a software change prevented my NT Server from booting-up. The data were still there but I couldn't boot Windows NT from the drive. I reinstalled Windows NT on another hard disk drive and could now access that old drive. I tried to reinstall NT on the original drive. The boot NTFS partition got trashed and I lost 3 gigabytes of installations, tape catalogs, a couple of years of bookmarks, plus who knows what! So far, that's five gigabytes lost. I feared that my hard disks were failing so I decided to get a new IBM 22 GXP hard disk drive. The next day I am supposed to go to a Microsoft Direct Access presentation and get an NFR Back Office SBE version 4.5. Fantastic timing, I'll wait until I get that before I reinstall Windows NT 4.0. SBE 4.5 t will have all the new stuff (Exchange, IIS, SQL Server 7.0, etc). I go to Direct Access the next day and find out that SBE 4.5 is still being manufactured for us. It will be back ordered for "two weeks". I have to install the old Back Office 2.5 and blow it away again after May 5. The next price to be extracted is another twenty hours of program installations for a few weeks usage before the next reinstallation. Now for a commercial break. Come to the June 6, 1999 Hardware SIG to find out all the details on hard disk drives. I finally got it to work after a very long weekend of Windows NT reinstalls (probably about five to seven or more at about two hours per iteration). You know the routine. Media Analysis to wipe the drive. Partition Magic to partition. reformat four NT Setup Disks. Start R:\I386\WINNT. 90 minutes later: "This drive has greater than 1024 cylinders... Press The solution was simple but nonsensical. On Tyan motherboards, there is a setting to Autodetect the hard disk drive. You run the Autodetect and it identifies the hard disk drives. For example, the CMOS will show that you have a Primary Master 8128 MB and a Slave 5120-MB drive. This won't work with very large hard disk drives (somewhere over 8.4 gigabytes). On Tyan |
motherboards, you must set the Primary
Master to Auto and Primary Slave to Auto. The drives are not detected at
this time. This forces the drives to be analyzed during POST (Power On
Self Test) and to be correctly recognized. It seems counter-intuitive to
me, but it was the only way to get the drive to be recognized. After
making some progress, I added a pair of drives to the Secondary port.
There was a partition recognition problem under NT. I couldn't figure it
out. I was looking at the drives with Partition Magic 4.0 and merged
some free space with an existing NTFS partition. I was tired and started
it before I realized that there was no point in doing it. After it
finished (two hours later), the data was gone. Another 3 gigabytes lost
for a total of 8 gigabytes.
An article that I read leads me to believe that there
may be more than one Microsoft NTFS format variation and creating them
by using different utilities will create incompatible formats. Hence,
running Partition Magic 4.0 is not foolproof and the result was not
good. The lesson here is that one must always back up even when using a
fourth generation product that has usually been reliable.
On April 15, 1999, I got an Acer Scanner for review. It is parallel port version that will run under Windows NT 4.0. I install the software (four HDD connected on a new motherboard). So far, so good. I reboot. The result is the Blue Screen of Death. It won't boot again. It appears the boot NTFS partition is dead. As nothing is going well, I reinstall NT two or three times more. I remove two hard disk drives and install an ATAPI CD-ROM. Now my problem is that I can't find my only DOS ATAPI boot diskette. I install by using a SCSI CD-ROM drive, instead. I remove the ATAPI CD-ROM and reattach the third and fourth HDDs. The result is the Blue Screen of Death. The bad NTFS boot partition on drive 3 (the one described at the beginning of the saga) is causing the problem. It hadn't been a problem before, but it is now. I use Partition Magic to repartition it back to a usable NTFS. The Blue Screen of Death is removed without reinstalling Windows again. Something went right! Now I'm confident. All those scanner problems were caused by a bad NTFS partition! I reinstall some apps and stuff for eight to ten hours. Finally, I can use a parallel port scanner for NT! I reinstall the scanner software. I reboot. The result is the Blue Screen of Death. NTFS boot partition is trashed! I reinstall NTFS, again. So I was wrong, it was the scanner software. I'll contact Acer about this. However, it is a great scanner (Windows 95) for the money. Windows NTFS installations: The typical Windows NT installation starts with a two-gigabyte DOS partition that is converted to NTFS (NT File System) during the installation process. I have been trying to learn how to install NT in a larger bootable partition. Everyone says it can be done, but they can only hint at how to do it. It turns out to be ridiculously easy to do. I'll describe the easiest case, which uses two hard disk drives. There are other ways to do with a single disk drive by using Partition Magic, but you'll be able to figure that out on your own. The boot disk drive should not have anything on it. The second hard disk drive (or partition) should have a DOS partition with a few hundred megabytes free for the temporary NT installation files. From the CD-ROM, run "\I386\WINNT /?" to read about the option for using a temporary drive using the "/T:" option. To install, run "\I386\WINNT /T:D:" where D: is the DOS partition. The temporary files will go to D:. Much later, within the installation program, you can make C: an NTFS partition of >2 gigabytes. Afterwards, you can remove the second hard disk drive (D:) if it was a temporary installation, or convert the DOS partition into NTFS. That was rather simple. Conclusions: After losing eleven gigabytes of data and reinstalling Windows NT about twenty times since February, what have I learned? First, when hardware starts behaving abnormally, immediately make a full backup. Second, before installing any software (or using a utility program), immediately make a full backup. Third, if you have a lot of important data on your system, immediately make a full backup. Fourth, immediately make a full backup. Once again, come to the June 6, 1999 Hardware SIG to learn about hard disk drive technology. You can contact me herbwong@primenet.com unless, of course, I should happen to be having problems with my computer. |
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Number 196 - September 1999 |
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