troubleshooting

Spontaneous system reboots

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting , , , , ,

Steve DeLassus asked me the other day what I would do to fix a PC that was rebooting itself periodically. It’s not him who’s having the problem, he says, it’s someone he knows. He must be trying to show up someone at work or on the Web or something.
So I gave him a few things I’d check, in order of likelihood.

Static electricity. A big static shock can send a system down faster than anything else I’ve seen. Keep a humidifier in the computer room to reduce static electricity. If you’re really paranoid, put a metal strip on your desk and connect it to ground (on your electrical outlet, not on your PC) and touch it before touching your PC. Some people metalize and ground part of their mouse pad. That’s a bit extreme but it works.

Power supply. This is the big one. A failing power supply can take out other components. And even if you have an expensive, big-brand box like a PCP&C or Enermax, they can fail. So I always keep a spare ATX power supply around for testing. It doesn’t have to be an expensive one–you just want something that can run the machine for a day or two to see if the problem goes away.
Overheating. Check all your fans to make sure they’re working. An overheated system can produce all sorts of weird behavior, including reboots. The computer we produced our school newspaper on back in 1996 tended to overheat and reboot about 8 hours into our marathon QuarkXPress sessions.

Memory. It’s extremely rare, but even Crucial produces the occasional defective module. And while bad memory is more likely to produce blue screens than reboots, it’s a possibility worth checking into. Download Memtest86 to exercise your memory.

CPU. If you’re overclocking and experiencing spontaneous reboots, cut it out and see what happens. Unfortunately, by the time these reboots become common, it may be too late. That turned out to be the case with that QuarkXPress-running PC I mentioned earlier. Had we replaced the fans with more powerful units right away, we might have been fine, but we ended up having to replace the CPU. (We weren’t overclocking, but this was an early Cyrix 6×86 CPU, a chip that was notorious for running hot.) Less likely today, but still possible.

Hard drive. I’m really reaching here. If you’re using a lot of virtual memory and you have bad sectors on your hard drive and the swapfile is using one or more of those bad sectors, a lot of unpredictable things can happen. A spontaneous reboot is probably the least of those. But theoretically it could happen.

Operating system. This is truly the last resort. People frequently try to run an OS that’s either too new or too old to be ideal on a PC of a particular vintage. If the system is failing but all the hardware seems to be OK, try loading the OS that was contemporary when the system was new. That means if it’s a Pentium-133, try Win95 on it. If it’s a P4, try Windows 2000 or Windows XP on it. When you try to run a five-year-old OS on a new system, or vice-versa, you can run into problems with poorly tested device drivers or a system strapped for resources.

Another good OS-related troubleshooting trick for failing hardware is to try to load Linux. Linux will often cause suspect hardware to fail, even if the hardware can run Windows successfully, because Linux pushes the hardware more than Microsoft systems do. So if the system fails to load Linux, start swapping components and try again. Once the system is capable of loading Linux successfully, it’s likely to work right in Windows too.

Troubleshooting advice: When you suspect a bad component, particularly a power supply, always swap in a known-good component, rather than trying out the suspect component in another system to see if the problem follows it. The risks of damaging the system are too great, particularly when you try a bad power supply in another system.

And, as always, you minimize the risks of these problems by buying high-quality components, but you never completely eliminate the risk. Even the best occasionally make a defective part.

Utility infielder

Dave Farquhar General , ,

My phone rang early Thursday morning. It was my boss again.
“Can you take a look at the RAS server? I’m tied up in meetings all day so I won’t have a chance to fix it myself.”

The RAS server is a small beige Lucent box. I’d dealt with it on the client side far too many times. I don’t understand the appeal of 28.8 dialup with only five lines, but I guess if you don’t want to pay for Internet dialup, it must just be the greatest thing since Linux.

So he e-mailed me the configuration of the machine, told me the root password, and I was off. It seems to run some kind of embedded Unix, but the command set is extremely limited. Since people were having problems dialing in, I didn’t want to find it was a hardware problem. Using US Robotics Sportster modems, I wasn’t going to rule that out. The Sportster was the best consumer-grade modem out there, but the Courier was professional. Nothing compares to a Courier.

I knew of a couple of US Robotics Courier v.32 modems in the back room. So I plundered them, brought them back to my desk, and started configuring. Then I realized why those modems were in the back room. The v.32 standard was 14.4. It didn’t matter if those old Couriers connected every single time–nobody was going to be happy with 14.4 dialup. So I piled the Couriers–each about the size of a modern laptop, along with a good-sized external power brick–on a corner of my desk and started looking at what I had.

After playing around for an hour or so, I was able to figure out how to get the status and configuration of the modems. And I almost immediately found the problem. The first person to dial in always had problems. Well, the modem on port 0 wouldn’t hold its configuration. I plugged my laptop into an analog phone line. It connected, first try. My modem just didn’t seem to care. I disconnected, and went into the back room. I checked to make sure all the modems were identical and had identical DIP switch settings. Indeed they did. I traced the cables. Nothing looked bad. The modem lights looked fine too.

I played with it all day. It was a true misadventure. Eventually I figued out the modem on port 0 wasn’t responding because there was no modem on port 0. I dialed in and stayed dialed in for a couple of hours. Catching up on e-mail and going to random Web sites at 28.8 wasn’t exactly a delight. Eventually I figured out that we were using an init string for USR v.32 (14.4) and not v.34 (28.8/33.6) modems. The difference was slight: the 14.4 string set register S0 to 1. The 28.8 string didn’t. I had someone who’d been having problems dial in. No problems. And she got better speed than ever before. I couldn’t believe it. Over the S0 register? Why would that make a difference? But if anyone knows modems inside and out, it’s Lucent. Not only do they make tons and tons of modem chipsets, they also make the equipment that all of them have to use to communicate, so while no one’s seen everything, they’ve probably seen more than everyone else. And init strings have always been a black art.

So I left, satisfied. I played out of position, but I found the problem. At least I found a problem, and my solution sounded plausible. My first day troubleshooting a piece of networking infrastructure looked successful.

Web browser troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting

Over the last couple of workdays, in between viruses, I’ve had to diagnose some flaky Web browsers. The browser might work fine for me, but a user will swear it’s crashing. You can run the repair tool on Internet Explorer and/or take them up to Internet Explorer 5.5SP2, then you can hit a few sites and see what happens, but even a Microsoft product can usually survive 15 minutes of regular work (unless we’re talking about Word 2000 with one of my book chapters loaded, in which case you’re lucky to get five minutes’ stability, but I digress).
A Web search on “web browser stress test” turned up nothing useful. I found lots of tools for stress-testing Web servers, but I wanted to stress-test the other side. Finally I just went to BrowserTune and ran it. When IE passed all the tests, I declared the installation stable.

Then yesterday I grew weary of only having the Dillo and Konqueror browsers on my main Linux box. Dillo is lightning fast but it still won’t render sites like cnn.com and espn.com properly. It’s readable, but sometimes annoying. It’s the best occasional-use browser I’ll ever see, but I’m not comfortable using it all the time. Konqueror’s a decent browser, and has a lot of promise, but it doesn’t always render things properly either. And sometimes it’s annoyingly slow. I needed a well-known browser that most Web designers keep in mind when coding their pages, but of course I wanted to compile it myself… That leaves out Internet Exploder, of course. And I can’t compile Netscape myself… Or can I? I went and got Mozilla, and the current build is almost indistinguishable in appearance from Netscape Communicator 6.x. I found it renders well, and quickly, loads about as fast as Konqueror. And it includes an invaluable resource: Under the Debug menu, there’s an option called “choffman’s browser buster.” It’s just a link to a Mozilla site that repeatedly loads Web pages for as long as the browser stays running (so, until it crashes or you close a window). Great stuff. If part of your job is building Ghost images for new PCs, you’d do well to run one or more of these tests overnight (why not run several, in separate browser windows?) to make sure your browser installation took. If you ever have to troubleshoot an end-user’s Web browser, you’ll thank yourself for bookmarking that site.

Troubleshooting a flaky PC

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting ,

After church on Wednesday, Pastor pointed at me. “I need to talk to you,” he mouthed. That’s usually not a good sign, but I hadn’t done anything too stupid lately, so I figured he probably didn’t want to talk about me. I was right. His computer was flaking out.
Having, at that point, nothing to go on, I suggested he run SFC.EXE, which scans system files for corruption. It flagged a few files, including user.exe. This isn’t always indicative of a problem, but it can be. I had him go ahead and replace the files it flagged. He called me and we walked through the process, then the computer just crashed. Bluescreen, in the kernel. Constant spontaneous crashes were the norm now. And the error messages were never the same, he said.

He asked what causes these things. I told him if I knew precisely, I’d be able to write a book that’d sell a whole lot more copies than my last one. Microsoft doesn’t even know why Windows does these things sometimes.

At one point he got an error message that said, in essence, to reinstall Windows. I told him I could walk him through it, but at that point I’d be more comfortable seeing it myself.

So that was what I did yesterday. The computer booted up fine, and I couldn’t find anything wrong. So we tried going online. That flaked out–the modem couldn’t connect and just gave false busy signals. I brought up HyperTerminal, tried dialing my own phone number with it, and the system crashed. Bluescreen. Kernel. OK, so I reinstalled Windows. It crashed during the installation.

Several things can cause that. I jumped straight to memory. Opening the case, I saw several possibilities. No-name Eastern Rim power supply. A microATX motherboard with the notorious SiS 530 chipset. I told him I’d run a diagnostic on it. Just to be on the safe side, I pulled the memory. It wasn’t commodity memory–it was an Apacer module. Apacer isn’t the best but it’s far from the worst. I cleaned the module’s contacts with a dollar bill, then put it back in and turned the system on to see if Windows could pick up where it left off. Note that I didn’t replace the case cover. An experienced tech never does that. Why not? I noticed something the minute I turned on the power. The CPU fan wasn’t turning. I found the problem. The dead CPU fan, incidentally, was a Vantec. No, not Antec–Vantec. It was a ball-bearing fan, and Vantec is fairly reputable, so this fan just died before its time. It happens sometimes.

So it appeared the crashes were due to overheating.

The local CompUSA didn’t have a single Pentium/K6/Mendocino Celeron CPU fan in stock. Bummer, because the marked price on an Antec was $13. So I went to Best Bait-n-Switch, where I found an Antec fan, made in Taiwan (good), for $15. This one had a drive connector, and I’d have preferred one with a motherboard connector, and I’d have preferred a slightly bigger heatsink, but it was all they had, it was bigger than the part it was replacing, and I wanted something right then and there. I bought it, brought it back, swapped it in, and the computer booted up fine, and finished Windows installation without a problem. I even ran Defrag afterward, since that’s pretty taxing on the whole system. I let it go for half an hour without a single hiccup. Problem solved, apparently.

It’s nice when you can tell someone it wasn’t anything they did, that it was a hardware problem. And a CPU fan is a pretty cheap item.

Optimizing Linux. Part 1 of who-knows-what

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , ,

Optimizing Linux. I found this link yesterday. Its main thrust is troubleshooting nVidia 3D acceleration, but it also provides some generally useful tweakage. For example:
cat /proc/interrupts

Tells you what cards are using what interrupts.

lspci -v

Tells you what PCI cards you have and what latencies they’re using.

setpci -v -s [id from lspci] latency_timer=##

Changes the latency of a card. Higher latency means higher bandwidth, and vice-versa. In this case, latency means the device is a bus hog–once it gets the bus, it’s less likely to let go of it. I issued this command on my Web server to give my network card free reign (this is more important on local fileservers, obviously–my DSL connection is more than slow enough to keep my Ethernet card from being overwhelmed):

setpci -v -s 00:0f.0 latency_timer=ff

Add that command to /etc/rc.d/rc.local if you want it to stick.

Linux will let you tweak the living daylights out of it.

And yes, there’s a ton more. Check out this: Optimizing and Securing Red Hat Linux 6.1 and 6.2. I just turned off last-access attribute updating on my Web server to improve performance with the command chattr -R +A /var/www. That’s a trick I’ve been using on NT boxes for a long time.

Baseball. I’m frustrated. The Royals let the Twins trade promising lefty Mark Redmon to the Tigers for Todd Jones. Why didn’t the Royals dangle Roberto Hernandez in the Twins’ face? Hernandez would have fetched Redmon and a borderline prospect, saved some salary, and, let’s face it, we’re in last place with Hernandez, so what happens if we deal him? It’s not like we can sink any further.

Meanwhile, the hot rumor is that Rey Sanchez will be traded to the Dodgers for Alex Cora, a young, slick-fielding shortstop who can’t hit. Waitaminute. We just traded half the franchise away for Neifi Perez, an enthusiastic, youngish shortstop who can’t hit outside of Coors Field and is overrated defensively and makes 3 and a half mil a year. What’s up with that?

Moral dilemma: Since the Royals don’t seem to care about their present or their future at the moment, is rooting for Oakland (featuring ex-Royals Jermaine Dye and Johnny Damon and Jeremy Giambi) and Boston (featuring ex-Royals Jose Offerman and Chris Stynes and Hippolito Pichardo and the last link to that glorious 1985 season, Bret Saberhagen) to make the playoffs like cheating on your wife?

Getting in touch with my feminine side

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

Soon after I moved back to St. Louis, Gatermann and I came up with a weird ritual for Friday and/or Saturday nights. Come Feb. 1999, I started writing my first book, which was a full-time job on top of the full-time job I already had, so my brain was usually totally fried after a week of troubleshooting Macintoshes for 40 hours and spelunking in Windows configuration files and writing about my findings for another 35-50 hours.
Sometimes our buddy Tim Coleman was involved too; it just depended on whether he had to work on a given night.

First, we’d go rent a movie, almost always an old Peter Sellers movie. Tom can keep the Pink Panther series straight; being oh-so dark and cynical, my faves are, of course, Dr. Strangelove, the classic comedy on nuclear war, and Being There, which is a very cynical take on what it takes to succeed in Washington. If you haven’t seen it, I’ve already given away too much.

Once we had a movie or two, we’d stop off at the local QT for some lovely beverages. You can get a 64-ouncer of whatever soft drink you want for about a buck, which is what we usually do. Note: A full 64 ounces of root beer does really bad things to you. You feel it in the morning. I know you’re going to go try it now, and you’ll be cursing me afterward. You’re welcome.

The first night we did this, Tim complained about women always using the facilities. I’d never paid any attention. But that triggered another part of the ritual. Being five-nine and about 140 pounds, I don’t have a whole lot of room to put 64 ounces of anything, especially when those 64 ounces are consumed within about a two-and-a-half-hour time frame. So, when I stood up about 45 minutes into the first movie to go recycle, Tom yelled, “Dave’s a woman.” When I came back, Tim got up. Tom yelled, “Tim’s a woman.” Without looking back, Tim made a one-finger gesture at Tom over his shoulder and kept walking. Tom enjoys inciting those.

We’ve seen every Peter Sellers movie available on VHS and we’ve tried every flavor at QT, so we don’t do this all that much anymore.

I bring this up because earlier this week, I received a flyer from Skillpath Seminars. The title of the seminar: Conflict Management and Resolution for Women. The guy who delivers the mail personally walked over to my cube and handed it to me with a smirk. Since I get about four brochures a day for various seminars, I normally put them in my round file without even looking at them, but I glanced at this.

“Dwayne got one too. We had a good time sorting the mail this morning,” he said.

Yep. Either someone told Skillpath about our little ritual, or some procedure was performed this past week that I’m going to be very unhappy about when I find out about it.

End of a long day

Dave Farquhar General

Have you ever gone on a date only because you feel like you have to in order to carry on a relationship that you think is over, but you’re not quite ready to drop it yet? That’s what writing yesterday’s entry felt like. And that’s what today’s feels like. I just re-read yesterday’s post, realized I didn’t complete a number of thoughts in it and only said about half of what I intended to say, and found myself not caring in the least.
Moodiness is a big part of who I am, and right now it’s showing big-time.

I probably spent a total of three hours on the phone yesterday, troubleshooting an ACT! problem over the phone. ACT!’s an extremely finicky program, caring about things it shouldn’t care about (for instance, you can sabotoge ACT! by putting it on a LAN with a PC that has an apostrophe in its computer name–ACT! isn’t even supposed to use Microsoft Networking for anything!), and an ACT! database can become corrupt as Warren G. Harding’s cabinet just from simple use. Sometimes the built-in tools can recover, and sometimes they can’t. Corrupt a database, and you start a vicious downward cycle. ACT! crashes because the database is corrupt, further corrupting the database in many cases, making future crashes all the more common and all the more destructive. Making matters worse, ACT! seems to affect other apps as well. When ACT!’s unhappy, the whole computer’s unhappy.

Career advice: If you want job security, learn ACT! It’s extraordinarily popular, and maybe it’s extraordinarily good for the things people use it for–I have no idea, since I’m not in any of the businesses that seem to be addicted to ACT!–but it’s also extraordinarily finicky and easy to break, and therefore extraordinarily profitable for anyone who sets out to learn how to fix it. I’d be willing to bet SalesLogix makes more money off recovering corrupt databases than they do off new ACT! sales. I know a lot of consultants charge upwards $400 just to run ACTDIAG.EXE (included with the program) on mildly corrupted databases and get them back in business.

Anyway… That was my day.

Gatermann sent me some of the pictures he took last week when we were up on the roof of Gentry’s Landing and elsewhere. They’re pretty spectacular. His site’s acting up so he can’t post them right now, but presumably he’ll send me a link once they’re up. They’ll definitely be worth a look.

And I’m wondering what would happen if we ever teamed up his camera with my words. Would we work well together? Could we find a project that brought out both our best?

Dinner and network troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Dinner with Gatermann last night. It’s almost become a ritual: Slingers at the Courtesy Diner, then off to Ted Drewes’ for frozen custard. We didn’t waste any time at Courtesy because the jukebox was especially bad last night. Backstreet Boys or ‘NSync or 98 Degrees were playing when we got in, followed by another one of the boy bands (they all sound the same), followed by Brittney Spears, followed by that really stupid “It Wasn’t Me” song–I’ve forgotten the name of the so-called artist, which is just as well. That was followed up by “All Star” by Smashmouth. Now, when I’m in my car and Smashmouth comes on the radio, I change the station, because that song was really overplayed when it came out, and it never was all that good to begin with. It’s really sad when that band is the best thing you hear all night when you go somewhere. I said something to Gatermann about buying a place like that, then putting nothing but goth on the jukebox. Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cult, The Cure, The Mission… What else do you need? We could call the place “Death’s Diner” or something. Since diner fare lowers your life expectancy anyway, why not, right?
But back to really overplayed songs… “All Star” was followed with “Cowboy” by Kid Rock. “Well I’ll pack up my bags and then I’ll head out west,” rapped the trash-mouth white boy from the trailer park. I looked at Gatermann. “Whaddya say we head out west and get outta here?” He agreed.

Drewes’ wasn’t especially crowded. There wasn’t much room in the parking lot, but once the weather warms up you normally can’t find a parking spot at all and have to park in the neighborhood.

We went back over to Gatermann’s, planning to play some Railroad Tycoon, since neither of us have played in months, if not over a year. Since he doesn’t have two Windows boxes anymore, I brought my IBM ThinkPad. I configured the network (I use a 192-net with DHCP; Tom uses a 10-net without DHCP),
then I plugged in using the cable from his Linux box, and I got lights on my Xircom PCMCIA NIC, but Tom noticed there weren’t any lights on the hub. I checked my network statistics. It had sent out a bunch of packets but never received any. I tried pinging out and just got timeouts. I re-seated the cable on both sides, then I re-seated the NIC’s dongle. Nothing changed. I wondered if I had a bad port or a bad cable. So I switched ports, to no avail. I powered the hub down and back up, thinking maybe it was confused. Nothing. We didn’t have any extra cables, so I plugged the cable I was using back into his Linux box. The lights on the card lit right up, as did the ports on the hub. I was able to ping too.

At one point I even stopped the card, ejected it, and plugged it back in. That didn’t help either. Tom’s network just didn’t seem to like my Xircom card, though it works great on my LAN.

Then I asked Tom if his hub was a straight 100-megabit hub or a dual-speed 10/100 hub. He said it was straight 100-megabit. That was the problem. My Xircom is a 10-megabit card. I started off with a 10-megabit LAN, then later upgraded to a dual-speed 10/100 hub so I wouldn’t have to replace all my cards. Later I added a four-port switch in the form of a Linksys cable/DSL router.

All of Tom’s cards are dual 10/100 (with the exception of a Kingston PCI NE2000 clone, but that card sits in his Linux router and runs to his DSL modem), so we could have solved the problem with a crossover cable. We’d lose Internet connectivity but that’s not necessary for two-player Railroad Tycoon. Tom has a crossover cable… in Kansas City. I have a crossover cable… at church. Neither was doing us any good.

So we didn’t play any Railroad Tycoon. We went through Tom’s files, found a few old pictures of me, and scanned one of them. The picture on my site right now is me in southern Illinois in May or June 1998. Some day I might even put up a current photo… Tom’s thinking I need to put on a pair of black jeans and a Joy Division t-shirt, then we can go find someplace with a shadowy, industrial feel to it and snap some pictures. He thinks it’d go well with the atmosphere I’ve got here. I tend to agree.

More Like This: Personal Networking

Building my Duron

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

I broke my own rule last night. Twice. You should never take down a working system to build its replacement. Get the replacement system working, then take down the system to be upgraded. If you’re cannibalizing parts from the old system, get the new one going as much as you can before you start stealing parts from the old.
Well, I never got around to ordering more cases and video cards, and I had this really fast board and CPU sitting here doing nothing while a decrepit K6-2 that’s needed reinstalling for two and a half years (another thing I never got around to) sat around taking up space. So I took down the K6-2, only to find it had PC66 SDRAM in it. I vaguely remember how that came about. So I took down my Celeron-400, which I thought had PC133 SDRAM in it. I was half right. It had a 128 MB Crucial PC100 stick and a 128 MB Crucial PC133 stick. Decisions, decisions. I put the PC66 SDRAM in the Celeron (it wasn’t happy about that–it took me 15 minutes to get those DIMMs to seat properly) and took both 128s and put them in the new PC.

I re-assembled the Celeron and hoped for the best. It powered right up and booted. It’s not as nice of a system now, with 128 megs instead of 256, but the speed doesn’t matter due to the Celeron’s 66 MHz bus.

So I tore down the K6-2, lifted out the old motherboard, dropped in the new FIC AZ-11 freshly configured with a Duron-750 and 256 MB of SDRAM set to run at 100 MHz (if I’d had two PC133 sticks I could have clocked it at 133 MHz and still set the FSB to 100 MHz–this AZ11 BIOS is very nice). I reinstalled my PCI SCSI, network, and sound cards and my STB Velocity 128 video card–yeah, it’s ancient but I love that card, and it’s still fabulous for a lot of tasks–and connected up all the front panel LEDs and switches. While I had the system open I decided to pull the CD-RW so I could put it in an external enclosure. Since I didn’t have the faceplate anymore for my PCP&C midtower, I scrounged around for something to put in that bay. A 12X NEC SCSI CD-ROM? Marginally useful. What else have I got? Hey, is that a 5.25″ 1.2MB floppy drive I spy? Why not? I haven’t had a 5.25″ drive in a production system in about seven years. And hey, I like retro. So I installed that drive.

I plugged the system into my KVM switch, crossed my fingers, applied power, and got nothing. So I ripped the system back apart and double-checked everything. It looked good to me. But wait… Why do I have two leads marked “Power Switch?” My manual for my case is long gone, so I went to PCP&C’s web site. That brown/white lead is reserved for future use. OK, ignore it. Hook everything up, still dead. So I crack out the manual, since the silkscreen on the board obviously is either not enough or wrong. Oh. The speaker and power connect one way, and the others, including power, connect perpendicular to that. How odd. I reconnected the leads, powered up, and everything sounded normal. Nice.

I connected up an external SCSI hard drive, because I didn’t want to touch any of the old drives until the system was up and running. I made a DOS boot disk with my SCSI drivers on it (since this SCSI card can’t boot off a SCSI CD), but I didn’t get too far getting a modern OS installed. The SCSI drive kept acting weird and refusing to boot.

Instead of really troubleshooting it, I opened up my drawer of 5.25″ floppies and started playing around. I found my old DOS 3.2 floppy. I went into the BIOS, swapped the floppy drives, threw in DOS 3.2, and… to my amazement, that disk still worked. My fire-breathing dragon booted into MS-DOS 3.2. So then I tried my Commodore-branded MS-DOS 3.3. That worked too. It was funny seeing Commodore copyrights all over the place…

I’ll have to see if I can get things working right later this weekend.

Troubleshooting a Mac SCSI drive

Dave Farquhar Macintosh ,

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Sometimes SCSI just doesn’t want to work. I tried to configure an Initio Miles 9100UW card and a 20-gig Seagate Barracuda drive in a Power Macintosh 8600 yesterday. I’d have much preferred an Adaptec card, because I haven’t had much luck with Initios in the past and Adaptec’s Web site has great tech support, but the user bought the stuff without asking me, partly because the Initio cards are really cheap. The 9100 spun up the drive and allowed us to format it, no problem. Then we installed an OS and tried to boot from it… Bus error. Or, if we were lucky, Error Type 96. (I’ve never seen that one before. I think we got a Type 97 once too.) We installed the factory SCSI drive, which we knew worked, alone on the Initio. Same result. I tried different cables just to eliminate that possibility. Nope. So I pulled the 9100 and the Barracuda and put them in a Power Macintosh 7300 we use for support. It worked the first time, and every subsequent time.

I found absolutely no reference to bootup problems with this card, or incompatibility problems, anywhere on the Web or in Usenet. The card had the latest firmware, so I went ahead and downloaded all available firmware versions and tested the card with them, one at a time. It seemed to get a little further in the boot process with the older versions, but I’d still get a bus error.

We ended up just putting the OS on his factory drive, kept it connected to the motherboard’s built-in SCSI, and we moved virtual memory and applications to the new drive. That way, he still gets most of the new drive’s speed benefit. Once the OS is loaded into memory, it won’t touch the old drive for much. Putting more time into it just didn’t seem to be worth the slight benefit we’d get.

Converting movies between different types. If you want to convert QuickTime movies to MP4 format (so you don’t have to keep QuickTime installed, or to make the movies take up less space on disk), you can find instructions for doing it here. It’s easy to use the Bink Converter to do other things as well, such as changing an AVI file to use a less obscure codec, or remove an audio track…

Conversion takes some time though. Don’t try this on your Pentium-133, unless you like waiting.

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