Cav's Place

Due to some unusual behavior noticed Saturday night (or Sunday morning, since it was about 5:30 AM), I decided to pull forward this month’s “computer maintenance” a little. So I ran chkdsk on two partitions on Sunday and was planning to backup and check the other two partitions yesterday, finishing up with a virus scan last night. However, the planned backup involved more than the usual instance of backing up important files on the USB stick bought just for this purpose, as I meant to finally get around to what last October I was thinking to do every two or three months and never did so far, namely putting in the old 160 Gb HDD and copying everything else, such as music and software kits, on it.
That didn’t quite go as planned, as yesterday I took to writing a little and then fooling with some numbers for a project of mine, plus playing Baldur’s Gate some more, as I finally bit the bullet and started it about a week ago, after finishing Anachronox. So I only took a break for the usual backup, putting off the other one for today. However, that break ended up being much longer and more troublesome than expected.

At first it seemed to be going well enough, as in there appeared to be no errors or problems while I copied the files, but that proved to be a wrong impression as soon as I ran chkdsk on the stick, after I finished backing up. Plenty of files were reported as having incorrect sizes and lost fragments, appearing as if some of the data I had just copied overwrote sectors occupied by existing files, obviously causing those files to be lost. And said files unfortunately included an older project of mine, abandoned a long time ago but kept around for reference in case I’ll ever try something similar again, which I had deleted from the HDD, leaving only on the stick…
Since there was little to do about that lost file and it wasn’t particularly important anyway, I shrugged it off and reformatted the stick, which took way longer than expected. Then I ran chkdsk again and had to wait for a long time, as it kept freezing for minutes on end. It didn’t even appear to finish properly, as it listed “an unexpected error” when it was at 99%. However, it didn’t mark any bad sectors, so I was somewhat confused. The signs of failure were obvious, but I couldn’t figure out what kind of failure.
Meant to try copying the files again, to see what’d happen, but discovered that I could no longer access the drive. Not only that, but trying to do so would cause the system to hang. Even clicking to “safely remove” it resulted in the same behavior, so I rebooted… Which required yanking the stick out, because the system seemed determined to get to the bottom of it as well and wouldn’t reboot until I did so.
But then I decided to try something else. Since there are two front USB ports, I simply put the stick into the other one after the restart, to see if the problem wasn’t somehow caused by the port instead of the stick. Interestingly, everything worked just fine after that, as I could access it, copy everything again and then run chkdsk with no problems. So apparently it was the USB port after all? That’s probably even more worrying, though somewhat less surprising, since the front ports are the case’s and that only had one year of warranty, which expired in May of last year…

Either way, those issues did finally provide the kick in the butt needed to actually get around to the other kind of backup today, which also meant I cleaned some dust out of the computer and checked the cables one more time. That’s because I heard something a few times this summer that sounded like a fan was rubbing against a cable, so I kept meaning to check that out and hadn’t until now. Didn’t find any potential cause for that noise, but it does seem quieter now, most likely because the fans no longer need to spin as fast in order to get the same amount of airflow, with the dust gone for the moment.
On the other hand, it also provided the kick in the butt required to get me to write a couple of little scripts to automate the backup process. You see, one of the four partitions was specifically set aside as a “safe”, with cluster size set to only 512 bytes and otherwise unused. The original plan was to keep a current copy of all important files on that partition and then also copy that version to the stick once per month, but I never did that until yesterday, when I gathered everything there before copying it all again on the stick. So today I took that one step further and created a batch file that, using robocopy /MIR, automatically updates that current copy of all important files on the “safe” partition and set it up to run daily through Task Scheduler. And then I made a second one, which updates those files on the stick and then runs chkdsk on it, so the monthly backup will now just require running that file instead of being a tedious task done by hand.

As usual, it takes problems to get one to make the improvements that had been necessary for a long time already. But I do hope there won’t be any more such problems in the near future. Still worried about the stick, however, so I think I’ll format it again next month, to see what happens before copying everything back. And if that doesn’t reveal any more problems then I guess I’ll have to see what’s up with that USB port…
But now you’ll have to excuse me while I get back to Baldur’s Gate, and likely also to my little project later. Then, assuming I won’t forget, I’ll need to run the virus scan tonight and check the system partition at some point as well, as that’s the only one left, because I forgot to schedule the check to run before removing the old HDD again…