Life Less Literary

Dammit! I got a phone call from RCS Printers who are supposed to be making me 5000 flyers and 350 assorted posters (100 A3 and 250 A4). They told me that the bride is pixellated on all three and the men are pixellated on the flyer. Also that the word “Marriage” is too close to the edge on the flyer (actually I suspected that, but forgot to fix it before sending to print). I’m confused about the pixellated shit - I did a trial print before sending it off, looked fine to me. I very much suspect what they mean is that the bride is out-of-focus. I would have expected a printers’, especially such a large and busy one, to know the different between blurred and pixellated but, WTF, they’re humans and humans are stupid. As for the men… ? I dunno, perhaps they mean that on the reverse of the flyer they’re faded? Yeah, I knew that, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read the writing.

Anyway, I took the call in a library, which wasn’t really the best place, so couldn’t discuss it at length. By the time I got back here, they’d all gone home, so I’m left pondering.

Meantime I tried to track down the InDesign originals… you guessed it, they’re on my faulty hard-disk. Ah well, I was going to have to open up the machine and have a poke sooner or later, might as well make it sooner.

First job is to try and work out which drive is which. I have six (count ‘em) hard disks stuffed inside my machine (albeit one of them has been unplugged for months, it’s just taking up space) and as well as the two onboard IDE channels and two SATA I have a PCI card with another two IDEs. Cue lots of unplugging and re-plugging trying to work out which was which. In the process of which I discover that G:\ - my “general crap” drive full of warez, DVDs and junk which I thought crashed out about a month back, is actually still operational, either it works intermittently or I just knocked a cable somewhere. So that was quite a nice surprise, but far nicer would have been to have got D:\ - my data and everything drive - working.

No such luck yet, but my detective work has revealed that the problem with D:\ is likely to be fairly high-level: it shows up fine in the BIOS, and even Windows Disk Manager reports it as “Healthy (Active)”, it’s only when I try to browse to it or use any files off it that I get the “file or directory is corrupted and unreadable” error. Also the volume label (which I think was “Data”) is not showing up in Disk Manager or Explorer, the latter just refers to it as “Local Disk”.

So I’ve downloaded a couple of trial versions of disk recovery tools, am running one right at this moment which has happily located and is now scanning the disk. If it comes up with anything then I’ll have to sling the authors $70 or so, which will allow me to use the full recovery power of the software to copy all my files off somewhere else (hmmm, lemme scan through all those other disks to find one with 100gig of free space…). Once I’ve done that I’ll probably… well, you know me, I live dangerously, I’ll probably just re-format the dodgy disk and stick everything back on there again

So, like I said before, all is not yet lost. It’s just… well, as is always the case with these type of events, it couldn’t have come at a much worse time.

But it’s nice to re-acquaint myself with the computer’s infernal internals every couple of months or so.

Over the past nine months or so, I’ve suffered three hard disk failures (another one went for good this morning). Prior to that, I’ve been computing for over ten years without a single failure. What has brought all this on? Are hard disks getting flakier? Am I just making heavier use of them? Is it because I built my own system this time around (about two years ago) and did a crap job of it? Is it because, for various reasons, I never switch my PC off these days? Is my system running too hot?

Well, at least with this latest failure (and I think the one before that), the latter reason seems likely. When I opened up the box to see what was wrong, I was amazed to find the edges of the hard disk units hotter than the centre of the sun (quite a lot hotter). I replaced my motherboard about six months ago (because prior to that, for about a year I had been suffering occasional reboots and other strange errors, which I diagnosed as being probably caused by a faulty IDE controller). Unfortunately, when I got the new motherboard out of the box I discovered it only had one three-pin power connector for a fan (my old board had two). I hooked up one fan (at least, I’m fairly sure I did…) and made a mental note to buy myself a power splitter as soon as I had a chance. Which, of course, I never did. And subsequently, it seems that I have accidentally or deliberately unplugged the sole remaining fan and forgotten to plug it back in. So my system was running, complete with about five hard disks and a couple of CD/DVD drives, with just the CPU and power supply fans to cool it (plus a couple of small fans on individual hard drive caddies), no air intake/outlet fans for the case. Hence, unsurprisingly, things got hot. I thought I had some kinda detector on the BIOS which was supposed to warn me when this kinda thing is going to happen, but either it wasn’t working properly or the part of the case where the detector is situated never got hot enough. It did seem to be in particular the part of the case where the hard disks were all crammed together (which is well away from the motherboard) that was sizzling.

So, I headed down to PC World to try and make an emergency power-splitter purchase. They didn’t have any, so instead I bought a fan which comes with an adapter to run off a disk-drive power plug (and I think they undercharged me: at least something good happened today). Came home and plugged it all in. I had a slim hope that, once the system had cooled down, the disk drive might come back online. No such luck.

Amazingly, I have so far been fortunate in what I’ve lost during these crashes. The first disk to go was a RAID mirror of my data drive, so nothing gone there. The second was my “junk” drive which, although it contained one or two things which I didn’t have elsewhere (like archives of old applications, and a couple of DVD movies waiting to burn) had nothing vital on it. The third was my MP3 drive which, although I lost a few files through bad sectors or mis-indexed blocks before it went for good, I managed to back up onto another drive once I saw which way it was headed. But I’m sure my “luck” can’t hold out. I really must burn some DVDs of my last three years digital photography, or else I’m really going to regret it.

Aargh! Crisis to deal with! But it took me about 2 minutes to get to the root of the problem (and 100 seconds of that was finding the right file to look in) while everyone else had been staring at it for ages - nice to be reminded that I do have a use once in a while.

The problem was on Chewchat - people were receiving the wrong messages! Aargh - our worst nightmare! Turns out, Guy who wrote the code made it insert each new message into the database, and then retrieve the message by selecting the most recently inserted item in the database - fine while you only have a few entries going in, but when (as now) the site goes ballistic and loads of people are sending messages, the last message inserted is not guaranteed to be the message inserted by the current process.

Got Tim fixing it now. Thanks god.