Dying hard drive woes

There are few things more annoying or scary to an IT person than a dying/dead hard drive. Annoying because you are often expected to make the drive magically come back to life when often it’s beyond any help; scary because if it’s an important drive that was never backed up, the contents of said drive may never be recovered.

Last week it seemed a perfect storm hit me. On Friday morning I checked our school admin server for errors in the Event Viewer for an unrelated matter. I then noticed that there were warnings in the log that the hard drive controller reported imminent failure. This was a Seagate 500GB model that was about 2.5 years old. I installed SeaTools on the drive and it confirmed that the drive was not healthy. I made the snap decision that I would virtualise the server to our XenServer that afternoon. While I had backups of the school admin server, the server could not afford any down time as we needed to enter and process academic marks.

That afternoon I started the process and got the server virtualised. It took a long time, but luckily everything worked ok in the end. All the files transferred. I shut down the sick server, booted the copy in Xen up and went on getting that server up to speed. One of the side effects is that I now have one less old server taking up space in the rack, and the virtualised copy is more robust than it had been on the physical server. Big sigh of relief, problem solved!

On the weekend, I booted up into my Windows 8 drive at home to do some work in Hyper-V. I’d noticed in the preceding week that this hard drive had vanished a few times during boot up, but I wasn’t too concerned. I did my work in Windows 8, but when I was shutting down, I started noticing some noises coming from the drive, like the motor powering down and up. Not the usual click of death, but a fatal wound anyway. This is a Seagate 250GB model.

The next day when I tried to boot into Windows 8, it wouldn’t get past the sign in screen. It would simply sit spinning around endlessly. More noises started coming from the drive. Boot back into Windows 7, run SeaTools. As suspected, this drive was on death’s door. I wanted to save my Windows 8 drive so that I wouldn’t need to reinstall and end up downloading all the updates again. There’s luckily no special data on that drive, besides the OS. I don’t have many spare drives laying around at home, so I ripped out the only other 250GB I had, which was in my old PC.

I was determined to clone the drive, but I had no luck. Drive Image XML would bum out after a minute as it hit problems on the drive. ImageX would also crash when it hit those problems. Clonezilla would crash when hitting those areas as well. The Unix DD command copied about 30GB before it crashed out, despite being told to run through errors. ddrescue managed to go through the whole drive, but it too crashed at the end. Perhaps I should have tried again. When I booted back into Windows 7, checkdisk took almost 45 minutes repairing file system damage to the cloned drive.

Unfortunately, said cloned drive refused to boot, despite all the files being there. Booting up off the Windows 8 DVD didn’t help, as it didn’t recognise the drive as a valid Windows 8 install, so I couldn’t run any of the automated repair tools. Then the cloned drive started making noises! Ran SeaTools and it failed that drive as well. Oddly, after I changed SATA ports and ran SeaTools again, the clone drive passed this time. However, I don’t trust this judgement.

As it stands at this moment, the original 250GB hard drive will boot, but will hang when trying to log into Windows and it is definitely a dying drive. The clone drive works but looks like it is terminal as well.

The scary part is that we are always taught to back up our data. Hard drive sizes have shot up in recent years, currently up to 4TB. Backing up to DVD is not really worth it or feasible anymore due to this size jump. The cloud makes sense for documents and a small photo collection, but becomes impractical for OS level type backups. External hard drives are probably the easiest, but they too can fail. It’s an interesting problem I don’t think we’ve yet managed to fully wrap our heads around.

Rant Mode–EA’s Origin platform redux

It’s not often that I end up ranting about something twice. EA’s Origin unfortunately has now earned my wrath for a second time. You can read about my previous grumblings here.

Last week, the Humble Origin Bundle went on sale. At the price the bundle was offered, I couldn’t resist ordering. Of the lot, Dead Space 3 is the newest game (Feb 2013), while the other games are anything from 1-4 years old. A lot of people have purchased this bundle, since it is great value and the proceeds are going to charity. More cynical people acknowledge that part, but state that the real idea is to draw people in to use EA’s Origin platform.

Unfortunately, it seems EA were not prepared for the influx of new users. Keys could not be redeemed as the servers had for all intents and purposes, melted under the load. Luckily I didn’t suffer this problem. What has been a problem however is downloading the games. I’m on a paltry 1Mb/s ADSL connection at home, and seeing the size of some of these downloads made it clear I couldn’t do it at home. Luckily I have the capability of doing so at work. I installed Origin and started by trying to download Dead Space 1. Starts off well enough, but then the download simply hangs after a while. Clicking the Pause button does no good, as the download never pauses. At this point I have to hard exit or kill the Origin task with Task Manager.

The line at work could have finished Dead Space over the weekend, but since the connection simply wouldn’t stay alive, I’ve had to baby sit the download in chunks. Not fun, and not the way Origin used to work. Origin didn’t have this problem with Mass Effect 3, so I don’t know if it’s one of their updated releases that did it or what. Numerous reports on the EA forums bear witness to the fact that I’m not the only one suffering this problem. All I want to do is download the game at work and transfer it to my home PC, something else Origin is woefully inept at doing. Steam makes this process idiotically easy.

Also, the latest Origin update has now decided it wants to download and reinstall all my Mass Effect 2 DLC, which for whatever reason it can’t pick up the fact that it’s already installed. The previous version of Origin finally fixed that problem, but it now appears to be back.

Digital downloads keep being trumpeted as the future of how content is distributed, but experiences like this only make me want to cling onto my physical media all the harder. Add the fact that internet speeds here in South Africa are simply not great, and the situation becomes somewhat painful. I can’t help but feel that part of the reason EA offered the bundle was to load test Origin to the breaking point, and then finally get sort out their service. Some commentators have said that we should look at what Steam was like after its first two years on the market, but I’m not sure that is a valid point. EA would have seen Steam’s problems, and could have worked to avoid it from the start. Everything Steam does wrong, EA could have done right, but it seems that this will never happen.

And to think, PC gaming once used to be simple and enjoyable mere minutes after buying a game….

Rant Mode–EA’s Origin distribution platform

In the digital game distribution world, there are many products that have come and gone over the years. Some have managed to survive with a small audience base, while others came, shone brightly for a while and then died. One name stands above all others however: Valve’s Steam. I’m not the biggest fan of Steam in the world for a few reasons, but it works well and has changed the industry probably for the better.

EA sold their games through Steam, but starting with The Old Republic and Battlefield 3, they no longer provided their games on Steam, but were instead forcing people to use Origin, their rebranded attempt at taking on Steam. For the most part, Origin has worked ok for me, but its features are lacking compared to Steam. In particular, the one that is grating me the most right now is the lack of a proper game backup/restore option.

I’ve recently just built a new computer for myself (more on that soon), and one of the things I needed to do was to set up Steam and Origin again on the new PC. With Steam, restoring backed up games off of my old PC was a piece of cake. Click on the Steam menu button in Steam, select Backup and Restore Games and follow the prompts to easily restore your games. Worked like a charm.

Origin has no such ability. A search found out that you could try copying the existing folder off the old PC onto the new PC and run some setup file in a specific directory to reinstall the game, but this file didn’t exist on my PC. Reading through other links revealed that other people also didn’t have this file. In the end, I was able to get Mass Effect 3 reinstalled by pointing the location Origin uses to install games to the new correct directory. I right clicked on the Mass Effect 3 game art in Origin and said Install. This proceeded to reinstall the game using the existing folder I had copied earlier.

However, after installation, it kept trying to download all the DLC I’ve purchased for the game, which is a multi gigabyte affair. After forcing enough cancels, it seems to have settled down a little.

Just when I thought I would be good to go, Origin wanted to start downloading every piece of Mass Effect 2 DLC I own and install it. I registered Mass Effect 2 with Origin, so that if my game disks are ever damaged, I can download the game for free. However, I already have all the DLC packs downloaded and saved, so I don’t need Origin to download and install them for me. I cancel every time I open Origin, but it keeps attempting to download the DLC files.

Origin has potential. I like its interface, as well as its speed. As a launcher of games, it’s pretty decent. However, many of the games that it supports managing in return have no idea Origin exists, so there is a disconnected feeling when playing an older game. Contrast that with Steam, where every game on the platform is Steam aware. If EA want to seriously compete in the digital download market, they need to ramp up the quality of the Origin client. They don’t even need to copy all of Steam’s features – just get the rest of the basics in place. It really isn’t too much to ask for. After all, the more competition there is in the industry, the more we as customers benefit.

My Origin collection of games. Note that only Mass Effect 3 fully supports Origin. The others were “redeemed” games in case my physical disks ever get damaged/lost/stolen

Windows XP at 10 years old

I must admit that it is sometimes hard to believe that XP is 10 years old now. In those 10 years, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen its various set up and progress bars, fought with infections, bad Windows Updates, incompatible software and many other things lost to the mists of time.

My first exposure to XP came in in my Grade 10 year at high school – 2001. It was a few weeks after XP came out and someone I knew in the computer room had managed to obtain a copy through a friend – illegally of course. We were all dying to know what XP felt and looked like, so we tested it on a spare computer in that lab. Of course, that’s when we ran head first into issues: The Novell Netware Client we were using didn’t run on XP, the Pegasus Mail version also didn’t run on XP, we couldn’t send and receive email using our crazy dial up modem solution. And of course, despite being based on Windows 2000, XP crashed a lot in those early days. Not nearly as much as ME or 98, but I saw plenty of blue Stop Screens in those early years. Oh, and the whole activation business was also a very new and untested step, with only Office XP before it being a wide spread product that required such a new and drastic step.

Eager to move away from the terrible ME at home, I got a copy of XP and installed it on our family pc. Suffice to say, I ran into the same sorts of issues with blue screens, incompatible drivers and software and just general irritations at how XP did things. In particular, I remember the Nvidia drivers giving a lot of grief, causing many random blue screens. Funny enough, that happened again at Vista’s launch. Food for thought…

Still, once it was coupled with Office XP, Windows XP became the base of my computing career. XP was a brilliant OS, but time has caught up with it. Malware, exploits and lack of features drove me to Vista initially, then Windows 7. These days, using XP is almost painful: no Aero Snapping, no Start Menu search, no DirectX 10/11 for increased visual fidelity and more. Imaging it across a network is painful as you need to maintain multiple images because you can’t make the image easily hardware independent.

Microsoft have been doing their best to get people to move from XP and with good reason – XP is a pretty insecure OS now in 2011. The firewall in XP is incredibly primitive, which requires a 3rd party piece of software to really do the job. All user accounts are created as Administrators on the initial set up screen, even if it’s SP3 integrated. There’s no User Account Control, no ASLR and DEP is primitive. 

I’m not sad to see XP start to fade away to be honest. It’s almost 2012, and while I will always have a fond spot in my heart for XP, it’s time for it to take that well deserved retirement now.

Handbrake and MP4

When it comes to watching videos on a computer, there is one thing that can be really annoying: different video formats. Over the years, the number of formats have increased, leading to some confusion and incompatibility. Whether it’s DivX, XVID, WMV, AVI, MPEG2, MPEG, Quicktime MOV, Ogg Video, Flash video and others, it can be downright confusing. The other problem is that since some of these formats are proprietary, they don’t easily play outside of their own players. Of course, there are universal players like VLC or codec packs, but these come with their own cons as well.

The other downside is that some of these formats are quite old, and as a consequence eat up large amounts of hard drive space due to less efficient compression schemes.

A couple of months ago, I discovered HandBrake: a free and open source video transcoder that uses the free and open source x264 encoder. In simpler terms, HandBrake is a graphical frontend to the x264 encoder, which outputs MP4 videos.

HandBrake main window

Speaking of MP4, I learnt that both the older DivX format as well as XVID use an older MP4 standard, called Part 2 ASP. The MP4 output by x264 is called Part 10 AVC, and is more modern than the older standard.

What this boils down to is that with HandBrake, you can convert almost any video format into the standards based MP4-AVC format. The end result is a file that can be played by hundreds of devices and the output file is quite possibly a lot smaller than the source file.

I have managed to shave off over 80GB on my video collection by converting the files into MP4-AVC. Some video files refuse to convert, and some others end up larger in MP4 format than what they originally were. This however is the vast minority, with the majority converting exceptionally well.

One of the more interesting things about the x264 encoder is that it is multi-core and multi-processor aware. Simply put, once you start an encode, x264 will max out your CPU. If you plan to convert many files, make sure you have decent cooling on your CPU. x264 does not use the GPU in graphics cards, which means that encoding takes a lot longer. From what I read, the reason for this is that graphics cards don’t output the same visual quality or have the flexibility of what a CPU based encoder can do.

It takes a while to understand how HandBrake works, but once you figure it out, the reward is worth it. You can download a copy from http://handbrake.fr/ and start saving on hard drive space now. Be sure to spend some time reading the wiki and user guides first however.

The end of an era at work

Last week Wednesday, an era at work came to an end. My colleague finished his last day of work at the school and was about to move out again into the big wide world of business IT. Apart from a total of about 3 weeks, the two of us have been together as a team for 2 and a half years, changing things left, right and centre at work.

Stepping back a bit, my colleague resigned on Friday the 5th of August, just before the school had a long 4 day weekend. When we came back in on the Wednesday, he dropped the news to me. I was shocked, yet not entirely surprised by it. Looking back, all the signs were there that he was getting ready to move away from the school. I could write about any number of reasons why he made his choice, but I think the reality is that working in IT in a school environment tends to burn you out. Politics, budget issues, salary issues and more all contribute towards a frustration that slowly builds up. I’ve suffered some of the same problems, so I’m very sympathetic towards his decision to leave.

The biggest challenge in the couple of weeks leading up to his last day was trying to cram as much information about the school admin system into my head as possible. My colleague has been the person more or less in charge of that since the start, due to his prior experience with the product. While I’ve managed to get most of the knowledge down quite well, there are still many areas I worry about. School reports are due in a few weeks, which will be the real test of things I guess. All the procedures are in place and ready to go, but it’s usually when marks start getting entered that things go wrong.

The somewhat annoying thing is that the school hasn’t yet taken any concrete action in finding a replacement. The principal had the idea of hiring someone for the rest of this year and depending on their performance and teamwork with myself, that they may stay on permanently next year. We compiled a list of qualities needed in a replacement and sent it on to management, but no advert has yet been published. When staff have asked me about this and I’ve told them about this fact, many of them seemed puzzled by the fact that an advert hadn’t gone out yet. I dare say that I’m pretty good at what I do, but the school network is too big for one person to handle alone, no matter how automated it is or how good the person is. Sheer size and scale just make it too much.

Above all else, I’m going to miss the team spirit I had with my colleague. We argued, had different views on technology, fought on how to to handle staff amongst other things, but in the end we were a team. We covered for each other and grew together. We balanced each other out and managed the workload between us. Time will tell whether such a bond will form with the new person, but I hope it does. There’s no real other way to handle things I think.

To my colleague, I wish you all the best. I know that you are already enjoying your new job, and I hope that you will have a long, enjoyable and constructive time at your new job. Thanks for everything bud  

P.S Indeed

After hours tech support nightmare

This week, I was asked to look at somebody’s computer as a personal favour to my dad. I don’t often do tech support work after hours anymore, as the problems that need to be fixed are often complex, bothersome and are more effort than the worth of the computer. However, as this was a personal favour, I said yes.

I always like to have background information on a computer before touching it, as sometimes knowing this is enough to fix a problem without touching the machine. In this case, all I got told is that the computer was working, but after a series of 3 rapid power failures, it now refused to start Windows and was saying something about a non system disk. My first reaction was to suggest that any flash drives, floppy disks or CD’s in the computer be removed, as this is often the reason for that type of message. Said person replied that there were none of those in the computer.

After I received possession of the computer, I started it up to see the message myself. After verifying that the hard drive was plugged in, set as master and so forth, I then knew that it was most likely damage to the file system on the hard drive. My recovery cd’s I had on hand couldn’t mount the drive, which was always a worrying sign. Using the XP Recovery Console, I was told that the drive was blank. This was not what I wanted to see, so I decided to hook the drive up into our old family computer and run the usual CHKDSK. CHKDSK refused, stating that the drive was in RAW format. At this point, I was willing just to give up and walk away. When a NTFS drive suddenly appears as RAW, it means the file system is badly screwed up. Data is usually still on the drive, but depending on how badly the FS is busted, that data may only be recoverable by professionals.

Today I decided to take one last shot at the thing, after remembering a piece of software called TestDisk. It’s an open source program that does data recovery from many file systems. Running the program, it told me that the boot sector was bad. I told it to fix that, after which I tried to get a listing of files so I could back them up. That didn’t work, as it now told me that the Master File Table was screwed. Taking a chance, I ran CHKDSK again, and lo and behold, this time it ran. Took quite a while, but it seemed to fix all of the file system damage. I tried to boot the broken computer with the newly fixed hard drive, to no avail. I inserted the XP CD again and ran FixBoot from the Recovery Console. I was going to run FixMBR, but didn’t want to damage anything further before backing up the files.

Going back to our old family computer, CHKDSK ran at start-up, repairing yet more damage to the FS. I ran it again afterwards, just to make sure, at which time it came up clean. Going back to the broken computer, I was now able to start it up and get into Windows. Unfortunately, the computer has a mix of AVG 2011 anti-virus and HP bloated printer software on it, which makes it crawl like syrup. The next time I restarted the box, the start menu had vanished, the RPC Server service refuses to start and more. I can’t even check the system logs, as without the RPC service running, the Event Viewer won’t open the logs. I’ve now thrown in the towel for good, and will be suggesting that the person buy a new computer. I’ve got their documents, which I can easily give back on a flash drive/DVD.

I’ve come to a conclusion about doing free tech support in my spare time: it just isn’t worth it. When you work on a 7-8 year old Socket 478 Celeron with a 20GB hard drive and 1GB RAM, you appreciate how far things have come in the last 2 or so years. As I’ve said to my dad, a computer is not like a car. While both are expensive, a car will give you anything from 10-30 years service if it’s looked after. A computer will give you perhaps 5 if you are extremely lucky before it becomes so old and obsolete that you end up spending more money to keep it running than buying a new computer. As sad as it is, that is the relentless march of progress in technology.

The greatest pitfall of e-mail

E-mail is one of the oldest and most useful tools around. Although the curse of spam is rather irritating and annoying, the system in general works and works well. There is only one area where e-mail (along with all other types of written electronic communication really) falls flat: conveying emotion and body language.

Today, we discovered a learner using a teacher’s class computer. This is against the rules of the acceptable use policy the students signed when getting an account for the network. Thanks to the use of KixStart logon scripts, we are able to identify the exact time, computer and user name of any student who does so. As standard procedure, we mail the relevant member of staff and ask them just to watch out for students doing this. We use a pretty generic template for sending these mails out, with language that is quite neutral and non aggressive.

One of the staff members we mailed replied to our email in a very strange way, written mostly in small letters with occasional words in capitals. Read on its own, the entire email seems quite rude and unprofessional. However, if it was said by a person, it could also be a witty response, depending on body language. Without the ability to read someone’s body language, you don’t really know the tone of the content of their message. My colleague took offence to this email and replied back to said staff member, asking that he be more gentle in his emails in the future. I proofread the email, and at no point do I think we were rude or nasty.

This teacher later came to speak to my colleague, after which things got a bit heated for no reason I could determine. Although I was busy with another staff member at the time, I kept my ears open and at no point do I think my colleague got rude. Nonetheless, the staff member left in a huff.

A short while later, we got another email from said staff member. This time, the first half of the mail could be considered threatening, with him talking about punching us in the face because he has Greek heritage etc… Said person to person, this could normally be taken as a joke, but in email due to lack of body language, those words could be conceived of as a real threat.

My colleague and I were not amused by this at all, though I suggested we just let the matter drop. Although I don’t appreciate such e-mails, pressing the issue may just cause unnecessary anger and frustration. I think my colleague is going to take the situation up with the business manager tomorrow, so I guess I’ll have to see what happens.

One thing I learnt a long time ago when it comes to e-mail is that you have to watch almost every word you write. Sometimes, things can come out in a way you don’t expect at all, causing grief where none was intended. Because e-mail is a lifeless inanimate thing, extra care must be taken to not offend people. Next time you write something, take an extra moment or two to reflect on what you’ve said. Pretend the person you are writing to is in front of you, then think how they would react to something you say. It might just be that moment that averts unnecessary anger and issues.

The Witcher 2 initial experience is troublesome

This past week, I decided on a whim to buy both The Witcher and The Witcher 2 on gog.com, a site that has earned plenty of praise for their work with, literally good old games. In particular, the GOG version has no SecuRom copy protection in it, something I am always happy to avoid. I must add that while I have no major issue with copy protection or DRM, it needs to work right, be reliable and not mess with Windows. SecuRom in particular doesn’t fit this bill, but that is a story for another time.

Long story short, I downloaded the files and brought them home. Installation of both games went well, no issues at all. The problems began once I tried to get online to register the games however. The Witcher website appears to have been redesigned shortly before the launch of Witcher 2, which is nothing major in of itself. What is a problem is that you cannot login or register on the site, with those buttons being greyed out. Attempting to register from within the launcher for Witcher 2 is a very hit and miss affair with the servers seeming to be constantly offline or having connectivity issues.

While I finally managed to get the game registered, I’ve been unable to download the first piece of free DLC they released. The launcher struggles to connect to their servers, most attempts simply die. When it does connect, it downloads the file, says Verifying and then does nothing. Going back into the Downloadable Content option on the menu shows that the DLC was not installed. Mass Effect 2 was a good example of how to do DLC right technically. Download an exe file, install it and content is available if you log in with the matching account.

Trying to register Witcher 1 has been even less successful, as it appears the servers are either down or not available. Reading the Witcher website reveals that there is some hairy server maintenance going on, accounts being moved, forums offline, use one account for Witcher 1 and one for Witcher 2 and many other issues.

The overall feeling from this is one of irritation. While I have no problem with server issues, a clear announcement on the front page of the website would be useful as well as some sort of concrete timeframe on when everything will be up and running.

In mitigation, I will say that perhaps the demand has surprised the crews at CDProjekt Red, and based on what I’ve read, they are working insanely hard to get it all worked out. It’s just a pity that no game seems to be launched these days without some or another flaw that makes the initial experience less than perfect. I begin to understand what draws so many people to consoles now…

Overall, I’m going to give things about a week to settle down, and in the mean time I can play through Dragon Age 2 and Witcher 1 before finally getting into Witcher 2.

Quick test of WordPress on Windows Phone 7

Just testing the WordPress app on Windows Phone 7. So far so good 🙂

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone