Cav's Place

After yet another HDD failure, I sent the shop an e-mail detailing the service history and asking what can be done. I was considering asking for another model as replacement, but waited for a reply before going that far, so I didn’t at first. However, instead of replying to my message, they apparently tracked down the last service request made for that account and called dad, as his number was listed on that. They didn’t even e-mail after he didn’t answer at first, obviously not knowing what it was about, so after I told him we sort of took it back and forth, with them telling him what can be worked out, him saying he’ll think about it and telling me what they said, me at first telling him what I’m thinking should be done next, then just panicking and not knowing what to do or say anymore, making things even more confused…
In the end, they offered the money back for this HDD if I’ll take it back and buy a replacement from them instead, suggesting the 1 Tb Western Digital Black for a mere 4 RON, so less than €1, after the discount, and saying it will also be possible to get the new one first and hand the failed one in a few days later, if I want to make sure all data is saved, assuming it’ll hold long enough for that. However, I have nothing to do with the 500 Gb I have, much less with 1 Tb, and I also saw a small but worrying number of complaints about repeated failures of the 1 Tb model, while for the 500 Gb one I didn’t see any failure mentioned or listed, though a couple of people said they ended up with some that were dead on arrival, probably after being damaged during shipping, since they don’t come in any sort of case or box. So it was left hanging once again, with me looking into other options and dad asking why don’t I just order everything I meant to order a few months from now and get it over with.

With that in mind and after various panic attacks generated by the situation changing and me needing to make decisions quickly while at the same time worrying about losing data in case I’ll be so unlucky that this old HDD I’m using as backup will decide it had enough as well, I settled on that 500 Gb Western Digital Black as the new backup HDD, a 250 Gb Western Digital VelociRaptor as the new primary HDD at least for the time being, a Noctua NF-P12 PWM and a regular NF-P12 as the new case fans, plus a legal Windows 7 Ultimate, as strange it is to have your operating system legally purchased around here. With the direction Microsoft has chosen for the development of Windows now, considering Windows 8, I reckon that, once I’ll get used to it, I’ll be sticking to that one the same way many others are still sticking to XP.
Of course, I did look for an SSD, but what I wanted, namely a 240 Gb, or at least 180 Gb, Intel 520, was unavailable here, so I had to give up and, as I said, for the time being stick to the Raptor as primary, leaving the SSD for next year, when I want to upgrade the other components as well, if they’ll still last that long, seeing as they’re almost five years old already. At the same time, getting that regular NF-P12 was obviously a mistake, seeing as the PWM version can be plugged into a 3-pin connector as well, but I didn’t see that being specified anywhere and seeing as I never got case fans separately before, I just got what matched what I have on my motherboard, namely one with a 3-pin connector and one with a 4-pin one.

While the Raptor and the Windows should be coming on Tuesday, I got the Black and the fans last evening. Opened the case, put in the HDD, then started struggling with the fans, not to mention getting annoyed when I noticed I should have gotten two of the better kind after all. Eventually had to ask dad to help me take the old fans out and put the new ones in, which had little to do with IT and a lot to do with being stronger and more stubborn than certain screws and parts of the case that refused to cooperate in any way, and then also had to figure out a way to make room for all the cables with a third HDD added for the time being, especially seeing as one of them is IDE and takes up a lot of space.
We struggled with that for hours, eventually putting everything back together after midnight, but that was only the beginning, as what I got when I turned the computer back on was continuous beeping and an apparent freeze while trying to detect the new HDD. I crashed completely, asked dad to come back and he started going bit by bit, asking what this or that is and what may be wrong while I basically just curled in a ball on the floor, repeating that I ruin everything, shouldn’t have gotten anything and that I’ll be left without a computer. Also found myself crying a little, likely thanks to the fact that I wasn’t alone, so I guess I’m thankful for that at least, knowing that it’s next to impossible for me to cry when alone.
After regaining some shred of control, I started working it out bit by bit, trying to figure out the reasons while dad was available to get his hands in there and do things if I couldn’t get myself to touch anything anymore. We realize that the beeping is caused by the fans not starting, so I gave up on my attempt to use the Y-cable the PWM one comes with to plug both into the 4-pin connector and, after the next couple of attempts to connect them in a more proper way also resulted in failures, gave in and plugged the PWM one into the 3-pin connector and the regular one into the 4-pin one. Seems the wrongest possible way, but it makes them work just fine, so I’ll leave them like that now.
That still did nothing about the new HDD, and various attempts to change BIOS settings didn’t help either, but after disconnecting it I could check that everything else was still fine, so left it like that and called it quits for the night, verifying that the backup was correct by comparing directly with what was on this IDE one. Hadn’t done that before, simply turning the failing drive off after the problems started and hoping it’ll still work enough to be able to make this comparison after I’ll copy everything to the new one, but I got it done then, just to be sure.

Today, after waking up, getting some things done on-line and deciding on a course of action while I wasn’t quite as panicked yet, I pulled out all the cables again, to make room, switched the ones that went into the new HDD and the failing one, also changed some BIOS settings, and managed to put in the jumper that makes the new HDD work in SATA 2 mode. I had checked that before and saw plenty of people saying that, even though it normally works in SATA 3 mode, they did not have to put a jumper on pins 5 and 6 and activate compatibility mode in order to get it to work on a motherboard that only supports SATA 2, so I didn’t do it either, but apparently that was the problem, because after I did that it worked. Of course, it wasn’t the only thing I did, but had tried those BIOS changes last night as well, and the connection was clearly not the problem, seeing as it continued to see the failing drive after switching the cables. The problem now is that the Raptor is SATA 3 as well and, if it’ll be like this one and not come with any jumpers of its own, I’ll have to look and see where can I find or, if it comes to it, how can I make one, because I only had this one available, which came with the failing HDD.

Unfortunately, after copying the data from this IDE HDD, which I’ll be giving to dad after this, to the new one and thoroughly checking it, the failing one decided it had too much and stopped being detected while I was trying to delete things from it. Also wanted to overwrite it before sending it in, but was just deleting the files, as a first step, when it simply vanished, not even letting me finish that. Now it may be a way for it to protect itself from further damage, so may be possible to “revive” it enough to try again, but if not, I guess that’s that. It is a rather uncomfortable prospect, sending it in with data still on it, but I guess there’s very little real risk if it can’t normally be read anymore.

Having some curiosity about this ever since release, I jumped at the chance when I saw this edition given away for free and I’m not sorry I did. Of course, it’s a collection of very realistic short stories and my main focus are high fantasy series, followed a long distance behind by a few other forms of literary escapism, so it’s not anything I’d particularly like, as the rating shows, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t meet my expectations. At times, it even exceeded them.
As for the stories themselves, the vast majority certainly seem extremely real and paint a pretty accurate picture of “democratic” Romania. A few do seem to be akin to those pictures mentioned in “Buried”, somewhat falsified, forced, in order to better present the desired concept, but the result justifies the approach and the overall image depicted still holds true. Things change, of course, and some did since the end of the period covered by the stories contained in the book, but in our case few of the changes are major, and even fewer for the better.

Rating: 3/5

There will be a lot of talking about this, Japan will most likely present an entirely different version of events, courts, judges and many lawyers will most probably be involved, possibly some international bodies as well, but for the moment the most information about what happened today is coming from Sea Shepherd and, while I wouldn’t necessarily put a few convenient slips or embellishments past them, I’ll definitely take their word over that of the Japanese whalers at all times. Not to mention that they seem to have a significant amount of evidence, so you can also see some additional pictures or, if you want, read the slightly more detailed version written by Paul Watson. And there’s also an article they linked to, which mentions some initial reactions from Australia.

If you don’t want to click any of that, the short version would be that, angered by the fact that their use of pretty much everything at their disposal short of live ammunition was failing to make the Sea Shepherd fleet back down and allow it to refuel, the Japanese factory ship, the Nisshin Maru, repeatedly rammed the Sea Shepherd vessels, as well as the tanker that was there to refuel them, the Sun Laurel.
By the end of the conflict, the Bob Barker had taken quite a beating, with a radar destroyed and many areas sustaining significant damage. At one point it was almost tipped over and taking water to the engine room, also being left completely without power for 30 minutes. The Sun Laurel apparently lost one of its lifeboats and mechanisms required to deploy the other. It is now being escorted away from the area by one of the Sea Shepherd ships, after members of its crew tossed them a message in a bottle stating that they have no desire to refuel the whalers, weren’t told where they were going or why by their captain and are unable to call home.
Probably after its captain and crew realized the extent of the damage caused and heard the Bob Barker’s distress signal, the Nisshin Maru turned and fled, and the Japanese quickly announced suspending this season’s whale hunting operations. Despite the sustained damage, two Sea Shepherd vessels are tailing it, however, in case it’ll turn around and try something else. At the same time, the Australian government claims to be trying to gather all the facts and the opposition has formally requested dispatching a Customs vessel into the area, to take control of the situation.

As a personal comment, I have to say I’m not surprised in the least by this turn of events, because the Sea Shepherd fleet truly is strong enough to get the job done this time around, but at the same time the whalers had noticed that they were shying away from potential collisions after such maneuvers had allowed them to refuel two of their vessels and transfer a killed whale, so it was clear that they were going to try it again. Thankfully, the captains of the Sea Shepherd vessels had backed down before only to maintain their ships in the best condition to put up a good fight when it mattered most, and this time they stood their ground and won the day. Now let’s hope they’ll win the war as well.

I said I won’t write two personal posts in one week unless I have to, but now I pretty much have to, because the replaced HDD lasted all of three months, and this time the signs of failure appeared very suddenly. Yesterday all seemed fine, today I first noticed a slight delay when I right clicked once, and then some 20 or 30 minutes later it locked up again, the exact same way it used to the last time it failed. Initially, I was able to reboot normally, as it recovered after a while, but then the only way seemed to be to press the reset button, so here I am on this old IDE one again.
Still as before, the failing one seems to work fine as long as you don’t touch whatever areas are flawed, but one of those areas affects a part of the system partition and another seems to affect the “safe” partition. Then again, that means that the actual data partitions are still fine at the moment, so after also copying the few things I had recently thrown on the desktop there to this one I turned that one off, hoping that this will prevent the damage from spreading and the data will still be recoverable in case I’ll end up being so unlucky that this one will fail now too, before I’ll get a new one, because that’s the plan. I will send it back for repairs, because it’s still under warranty until the start of April and it’s their job to fix it yet again, but I’ll only do that after I get a new one, so I won’t have to rely on it again after I get it back.

What worries me now is that I took too long installing Windows and all the updates again on this one, only installing BitDefender when it was all done, quite a few hours later, and it said it detected three threats while installing, requiring a reboot to clean them. I had noticed some strange behavior before, the computer taking a very long time to reboot, with the HDD appearing under a light but constant load on the shutting down screen, but I didn’t connect it with a potential threat until I saw that. Worse, it didn’t say what the threats were, only saying it had moved them to quarantine, but there was nothing in the quarantine or in the logs after it was installed, and nothing but a couple of tracking cookies showing up on a full scan either, so I have no idea what it did and what those threats were and I’ll keep wondering and hoping it wasn’t anything that stole any data I had here or typed during that time, as I did do a few things…

Now I guess I have to pick a new HDD ahead of the scheduled upgrade, wait for it to arrive and meanwhile hope there won’t be any more issues… And that those threats were nothing important. The best case scenario would be that they were false positives, or perhaps some other tracking cookies it noticed during that scan, though I don’t see why would it scan for those before installing, but it’s the same version I installed quite a few times before and this never happened, so not sure what those false positives could be…

Considering what’s going on outside my window, I ended up spending quite a lot of time this week making plans for things that’ll almost certainly never become reality, such as the house I’d like to live in and the garden I’d like to have. Of course, I regularly spend a good part of my time making impossible plans and it’s hardly the first time I focus on these particular ones either, but this time I was particularly thorough, looking up information about plants and planting and actually getting around to drawing the house plans. Good thing, actually, seeing as that made me aware of some serious problems my last stable plan had, which I had somehow missed while I was only relying on mental images, and I came up with something that’s definitely better. Unfortunately, it’s also 25% bigger, taking it from just below what I’d consider optimal for two people to the top of that range, but it doesn’t exceed it, so it’s still fine.
There are some more immediate plans as well, still related to what’s going on outside, but since they’d require getting out there and doing things I’ll be seen doing and asked about, they’re extremely unlikely to become reality as well. Unlike the house and garden ones, they’re not entirely impossible, but I’ll be very surprised if any of them will come to fruition, whether I have anything to do with it or, most probably, not. Most likely, nothing good will happen this year either, what was nice about this place continuing to degrade, which has been steadily happening for the past few years.

Otherwise, I seem to only be capable of writing serious non-personal posts if they stem from an argument on an important issue, and I didn’t exactly have any of those this week, so I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be writing about over the weekend. I had some things to add to the previous post, had actually been ready to write a second part to it on Monday, but my Internet access was down a good part of the day then, the people from the network I’m now in saying they suspect RDS had a hand in it, so I put the idea away then and didn’t get back to it since, seeing as it wasn’t a current argument anymore. It’s still the best chance I have to actually write something, however, so unless something else happens to pop up once again, that may well be what I’ll end up doing, albeit knowing it’ll end up worse than what I’d have written then.
Yes, I know I still have that post about the computer upgrade plans pending, but quite frankly there’s too little to say about it now that I largely switched next year’s plans to this year and pushed what was originally planned for this year to the next. And that’d just be another personal post anyway, and I don’t want to have two of those in the same week. I have plenty of “slots” left for it, sure, but I’d rather not use them up unless there’s no other way.

And last but not least, judging by the logs, somebody sure seems to have found me yesterday, so hello there. Saw anything particularly interesting? Is it safe to assume we used to know each other?