My AC went out on Saturday evening… didn’t get it running again until last night. Unfortunately I didn’t think about the PCs and lost a hard drive to the heat. It will take me a few days to get another drive loaded and going and this is my main PC/cruncher.
The room was closed up so temps reached upwards of 100F in the room, I’m feeling fortunate that it was only a HD that crashed and not a burned up processor.
The fortunate thing is that the processor didn’t go, if the processor had gone, it might have taken the HD anyway. It’s unfortunate that you have to find the money for the new HD Ben, but it would or could have been worse I suppose.
A/C failed again yesterday. My only guess is that I didn’t let it thaw long enough before turning it back on so I left it off last night and turned it back on this morning. I wouldn’t even bother since temps outside aren’t going to be that high but with two extremely furry animals, I don’t want to risk them overheating. If its not working today I’ll have to check on warranty stuff and get someone out to look at it. Because of a few issues, I never even got a chance to work on my PC last night.
:wall: Because of the AC staying out for a couple of days, I didn’t touch the PC. I finally got to it last night and thought I’d give 'er on last try. Booted right up, scanned the disk and all is kosher. I’m glad that the drive didn’t go because I had thought I lost quite a bit of data but I’m really irked that I’ve lost 4 days of crunching or ~40 units from that machine. Plus the machine upstairs has been down for a few days too. Hopefully I’ll get it back on and running tonight.
Wow, you’ve been having a bit of a rough time recently. Still nice to know its all sorted now and you didn’t loose any data or more importantly WUs :scared:
Ben, I woulda tossed in the towel and got some fans and opened the windows hehehehe
Seriously though, I know what its like to losing hardware from a failed a/c unit. I lost my Athlon 800 a year ago almost to the day of your initial problem. The heat sync was completely blackened and the board, well, couldn’t touch the darned thing it was so hot. Toasted the entire set-up. ;( But, a good thing came out of it, I was able to convince my wife to let me build another box Of course, that didn’t take much as it was her computer that burned up
Yeah, no kidding about the power issue, glad to see you have some power now, or so I would guess since you’re online.
System has been running fine for a couple of days now, I think it’s okay just can’t stand the heat. Glad to see some of our Euro folks getting a break from this heat.
Had surgery today, removed some tissue that was borderline melanoma. The shots hurt and didn’t even get rid of everything as I could feel her stitching me back up at the end.
Hope all goes well for you m8. Anesthesia seems to be getting more & more minimalistic due to the cost of an overnight stay. Latest news in UK is heart bybass with epidural. I mean, imagine being concious through that lot :(. IMHO really, really knock me out.
I don wanna know.
It looks like the drive itself is overheating because the system is showing well within temp range (processor was about 51C). And I only say its overheating because there does not appear to be any noise coming from the drive and virus scans are clear, although it also doesn’t appear to be following any pattern, either. I pulled the drive last night and installed another 20 GB I had laying around. My data restore failed on the second tape. :wall:
So I began another hard drive load from scratch. Once I get it up and going (I have the OS loaded, loaded all updates and security patches, the firewall, antivirus, WinZip, then SETI and SETIDriver), I’m going to add the second drive as a secondary and see if I can recover any of the data from it. If this new drive does the same thing as the old one, I may just up and throw the whole machine out the window.
Looks like I’ll be down again. Replacement hard drive is going tits up as I type. I’m picking up a new drive tomorrow I hope, if I can manage to spare the cash. I can’t get SETI running, probably be shutting 'er down in a few minutes to try and preserve my drive so I can retrieve my data. This has been a nightmare. Here’s a summary:
A/C went out - hard drive overheated and stopped working.
Few days later, before installing my replacement, booted up and this one worked for a while, then began having problems again. Replaced drive, began restore from tape and it failed. Reinstalled basics manually, then set up old drive and copied over most of what I was missing. New drive begins acting flaky with read and write errors. Files start disappearing. Funny sound heard briefly, then disappears. Old hard drive bites the dust more permanently.
So if I lose this drive, I lose an immense amount of data, music, pictures, software and I don’t know what I’ll be able to get back. I don’t have any CDs to use to burn the most important stuff, either. :mad: :realmad: :wall: :crash:
Well, I couldn’t resist playing with it some more, like a scab that’s ready to come off. I opened the case back up and found the noise I kept hearing is NOT the drive. Apparently when I put the old hard drive back on to pull data from it, I didn’t put the cables back as neatly as I would have liked and a wire kept getting hit by a case fan. I’ve heard wires being hit by fans before and its never sounded like this… this purely sounded like a hard drive in death throws.
So now to figure out what happened to the missing files. Part of them were SETI. Actually, the entire seti folder is gone and I think I know how. I pulled the single processor file from the website to set up SETI as a service. I had it done on my old drive but I couldn’t remember how I got it that way. I didn’t follow the instructions exactly. I edited the seti.reg file to customize it for my directory and what I needed, then copied all the files over to my seti directory, specifically: c:\program files\seti. Then I ran install, which I didn’t realize until afterward was a batch file and needed to be modified as well. I modified it and tried to run again and it didn’t help matters. seti doesn’t show up as a service but sysrun does. Unfortunately, I can’t find my seti directory, but if I try to create a directory called seti it tells me the directory already exists. I have my folder options set up to show all files and folders, including hidden ones. I’m guessing the registry is somehow corrupted and that’s why its not showing up. What can I do to repair this?
The other files I had missing were music files and a couple of scanned documents that I’ve noticed so far. I have a feeling these were because the old drive had bad blocks where those files sat and so they couldn’t be read to copy. I installed seti fresh, so I know that’s not it. Plus, I started seti driver from a shortcut I had deleted and it brought up seti driver and it was midway through a unit.
Hey Ben…I think you may have a voltage cap problem…no really…a Cap is those little Black thinks that are typically near the power connection on the MOBO. They regulate the voltage and on many MOBO they leak…Look close…if the top silver part appears popped up some …thats a cap blown…
If that happens it get hot faster and regulates the volts wrong to HD’s and PCI bus…
I’ve seen it eat several HD’s before I found it on a MOBO …look close…
If so…New MOBO is next…
Hope it’s ok…but thought you should look…
Regards,
Greg…Ok 97 here in Chicago Area…and more for tomorrow…
Originally posted by STEP2000 If so…New MOBO is Next…
Why wouldn’t you just replace the cap? You can get the specs off the cap itself and sourcing the part would be easy. After that it’s just a little soldering. Are you worried about damage to the mobo downstream from the cap?
Originally posted by Egad Why wouldn’t you just replace the cap? You can get the specs off the cap itself and sourcing the part would be easy. After that it’s just a little soldering. Are you worried about damage to the mobo downstream from the cap?
To Greg: Thanks for the tip, I’ll double check it. I’ve heard of the problem before but thought that larger manufacturers were less prone to it. I honestly think its some registry corruption causing my current issue, though.
Egad: Technically you could replace the cap if the specs are on it. Some of these coming in already on a board don’t always have the specs, I think. The difficulty would be soldering it in place without burning something else up. While I’m fairly handy with a soldering iron, I don’t know that I could manage that safely on a board that complicated and with multiple layers.