Blog entries from November, 2004

The 2004 Australian Open Source Developers’ Conference starts tomorrow which will be very good. Unfortunately this also means that there is a scant 65 hours until I have to present my own talk…

Yet again thanks to eBay I will be shortly getting two new PowerMac’s for my collection, the 9600 that I mentioned in a previous entry and a 7600 as well from the same seller. Now to arrange pickup…

This morning I picked up the first Apple for my collection that is in a tower configuration instead of a desktop. It is a Power Macintosh 6400 and photos are already up.

What is ironic is that there is currently another PowerMac model that I have been wanting for a while up on ebay, a Power Macintosh 9600/200 that ends in a little over 2 days…

Tonight I caught the shuttle bus over to the Caulfield campus to attend the first event by a new Service Oriented Computing special interest group that has been setup by the Victorian branch of the Australian Computer Society. It was pretty interesting and the topic is likely to become very relevant to how the my.monash portal integrates with other services in the future.

As the shuttle bus had stopped running by the time it finished I had to catch a train and a bus to get back to the Clayton campus in order to pickup my bicycle and ride home. This meant I was able to spend about half an hour taking photos of Caulfield Station.

This morning I picked up the first new item for my collection in almost two months and the first new Apple for quite a while, a Power Macintosh G3. While I was taking photos I took the opportunity to install the PC Compatability Card that I got a while ago for my Power Macintosh 7200.

My most recent Amazon order arrived today giving me more books to read at some stage. They are:

• The Art of Unix Programming
• Hackers & Painters
• Professional Software Development
• The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man

Now to find the time to read them after I finish the other books in my to read list…

On my way to and from Melbourne Perl Mongers on Wednesday night I was able to spend a few minutes taking some photos of Spencer and Flinders Street Stations.

On thursday I picked up a pair of new 160GB hard drives, WD1600JB’s to be precise, and I have just finished rebuilding Preston with them in a new case that I also cleared out the 120mm fan hole for. Photos are available including some before shots. Once I have copied all the data from the LVM set with the faulty drive to the new set made of the new drives and verified that all is ok I will be pulling out the old drives to leave Preston with a more modest total of 400GB (381GB if you want to count properly).

One good thing that I have learned since my earlier post is that the faulty drive is still under warranty until July next year. Now what to do with three 80GB drives…

Earlier tonight I downloaded the SeaTools Diagnostic Suite and I used it to perform two full tests of all three of the Seagate drives in Preston.

And hdc, the odd drive out, was reported as having quite a number of bad sectors. I decided not to let the utility attempt to fix the errors as I then won’t be able to tell which files are corrupt without testing them all one by one.

Time to organise some new drives although I believe I will lose the ability to monitor the temperature of the drives directly if I go for Western Digitals rather than Seagates…

Doing duty as my media storage and backup box is Preston, one of the two boxes that is always on. In it are four 80GB drives, one Western Digital WD800JB and three Seagate Barracuda IV‘s. The three seagates are combined into a single logical volume using LVM.

On the weekend as I was copying music across to Shaun in order to back it all up on to DVD’s I noticed it pause a couple of times during copying. Further investigation led me to discover a large number of instances of the following two lines in the kernel log:

hdc: dmaintr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=42315658, sector=42315480
hdc: dmaintr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }

I was able to tell from the transfer log which files had paused and I was able to verify that they were corrupt and the errors appeared in the kernel log.

While the three drives in the logical volume are the same model one does have a couple of differences:

• It is mounted differently in the case which means it runs hotter as there is not as much airflow as over the other two
• It is connected via the motherboard IDE controller rather than the Promise card
• It is around about 4 months older than the other drives
• It was used as the boot drive in Shaun before moving into Preston

Another thing the kernel log shows is that the previous occurances of these errors was back at the start of October, the same day that I transferred a copy of most of the data across to a friend’s box. This indicates that the error has been there for a while but it hasn’t been evident as I rarely access those particular files.

Fortunately only one of the three drives has experienced the errors, the one that is different as explained above. I seriously doubt that the issue is with the onboard IDE controller as the boot drive is operating fine. Googling around brings me to the conclusion that this drive has developed a fault and I should replace it…

But with what? Do I spend AU$99 on a replacement 80GB? What about spending AU$278 on a pair of new 160GB drives? This last option does have the advantage of giving me an additional 80GB capacity with one fewer harddrive to mount and keep cool. Then what do I do with the two perfectly good 80GB drives?

There is even the option of replacing the faulty drive with a 160GB. This gives me the additional capacity but has the much more tricky task of rearranging the data on the drives rather than copying from the old volume to the new volume.