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The secret word is 'original'
Nov. 12th, 2007 01:14 pmFun weekend.
Spent most of Friday and Saturday either prepping for the game or trying to make progress on several of the writing projects (all in keeping with GeneStoFinMo, of course), and doing the laundry.
The game prep was complicated by the fact that my desktop computer at home as been exhibiting odd symptoms. I have several bad habits about my home computer. I leave it up and running for days or weeks at a time. Which is a waste of electricity, and also gives ample opportunities for things to go wrong--either hardware glitches or software problems. I also run a bazillion programs at once. E-mail, browser, wordprocessor, and iTunes, are almost always open. Quite frequently things like PageMaker or InDesign or Photoshop or Illustrator may also be running for many hours or days at a time.
And I've been using computers in one way or another for over 25 years, so my first reaction when something seems to lock up, or a program doesn't want to close is to shrug1, shut, and restart. Back in the Ancient Times when my computer was a little Apple ][c clone, I had to reboot if I wanted to used AppleWorks instead of AppleWriter, for instance.
Now things don't generally lock up or crash anywhere nearly as often as they used to, but I still have the habits.
Anyway, there have been several times in the last ten days when the system was either just responding very slowly or something had actually locked up2. So I would save things in the other programs, shut down, and reboot.
And just about every time, instead of rebooting normally, the system has popped up with basically a CHKDSK error, and saying the drives needed to be scanned. The first time it scanned all the drives before letting me start up. Since then, reboot usually means the the E: drive (which is just a partition of Disk 1, not a separate disk) has the CHKDSK error and has to be scanned.
At one time, the E: drive was where I had iTunes storing the music. And a bunch of the files are still there (since iTunes doesn't have an elegant way to move your library), and since iTunes was often having problems, I thought maybe the problem was there, right?
I ran scans and diagnostics. Nothing came up. Then I made sure my anti-virus software was up-to-date and had it scan. Then I updated my Ad-Aware and had it scan. Then I defragged everything. And ran some more diagnostics.
Nothing. Michael suspected the hard disk was having physical problems3, so he had me back everything up (since I haven't in a couple months). That took time. Then I had iTunes back up the library and that went fine. Because I'm feeling paranoid, I had iTunes do a separate backup of just the purchased songs.
In the middle of said backup, the computer blue-screened. Said there was an error on the hard disk.
While I was poking around afterward, was when I realized that pretty much all the purchased songs are over on H: which is an actual different physical hard disk. And not the one that any errors have been generated on during boot up. And if iTunes, running on drive C:, encountered a fatal error trying to back up songs stored on drive H:, one would expect that drive C; or H: would be the ones generating an error, right?
As Michael pointed out, just because the system is reporting disk errors doesn't mean the actual problem is the disk, it could be the systems accessing and controlling the disk. Or the new version of iTunes could have a bug that is causing it to do something funky with the file storage. Or... yeah, just about anything.
Anyhow, today's his day off and he always takes it personally when a computer he built starts acting up, so he's trying to narrow down the problem and figure out what it would take to fix it4.
So, I don't know what I'm going to find when I get home. I can do most everything I need to do in the next day or so with my laptop, though not having access to some files on the computer while something is being backed up or swapped out would block several projects.
*sigh*
I suspect I'm not going to get my wordcount back up to where I want it on GeneStoFinMo. But I refuse to give up!
1. Okay, as Michael would be the first to tell you, I swear like a sailor for a bit, and then shut down and re-boot. But I also swear at the computer when I click on the wrong icon, or when it takes longer to do something than I think it ought, so just because I'm cursing doesn't mean I think it's a serious problem.
2. About half the time the program locked up has been iTunes.
3. Not terribly surprising, since we are getting disk errors.
4. I refrained from accusing him of setting this up to give him an excuse to upgrade me. You may recall a few months ago I had to track down proof that (at the time) my computer was only eleven months old, because he was absolutly convinced that it was older and I desperately needed an upgrade5.
5. I have before pointed out that he's addicted to updating...
Spent most of Friday and Saturday either prepping for the game or trying to make progress on several of the writing projects (all in keeping with GeneStoFinMo, of course), and doing the laundry.
The game prep was complicated by the fact that my desktop computer at home as been exhibiting odd symptoms. I have several bad habits about my home computer. I leave it up and running for days or weeks at a time. Which is a waste of electricity, and also gives ample opportunities for things to go wrong--either hardware glitches or software problems. I also run a bazillion programs at once. E-mail, browser, wordprocessor, and iTunes, are almost always open. Quite frequently things like PageMaker or InDesign or Photoshop or Illustrator may also be running for many hours or days at a time.
And I've been using computers in one way or another for over 25 years, so my first reaction when something seems to lock up, or a program doesn't want to close is to shrug1, shut, and restart. Back in the Ancient Times when my computer was a little Apple ][c clone, I had to reboot if I wanted to used AppleWorks instead of AppleWriter, for instance.
Now things don't generally lock up or crash anywhere nearly as often as they used to, but I still have the habits.
Anyway, there have been several times in the last ten days when the system was either just responding very slowly or something had actually locked up2. So I would save things in the other programs, shut down, and reboot.
And just about every time, instead of rebooting normally, the system has popped up with basically a CHKDSK error, and saying the drives needed to be scanned. The first time it scanned all the drives before letting me start up. Since then, reboot usually means the the E: drive (which is just a partition of Disk 1, not a separate disk) has the CHKDSK error and has to be scanned.
At one time, the E: drive was where I had iTunes storing the music. And a bunch of the files are still there (since iTunes doesn't have an elegant way to move your library), and since iTunes was often having problems, I thought maybe the problem was there, right?
I ran scans and diagnostics. Nothing came up. Then I made sure my anti-virus software was up-to-date and had it scan. Then I updated my Ad-Aware and had it scan. Then I defragged everything. And ran some more diagnostics.
Nothing. Michael suspected the hard disk was having physical problems3, so he had me back everything up (since I haven't in a couple months). That took time. Then I had iTunes back up the library and that went fine. Because I'm feeling paranoid, I had iTunes do a separate backup of just the purchased songs.
In the middle of said backup, the computer blue-screened. Said there was an error on the hard disk.
While I was poking around afterward, was when I realized that pretty much all the purchased songs are over on H: which is an actual different physical hard disk. And not the one that any errors have been generated on during boot up. And if iTunes, running on drive C:, encountered a fatal error trying to back up songs stored on drive H:, one would expect that drive C; or H: would be the ones generating an error, right?
As Michael pointed out, just because the system is reporting disk errors doesn't mean the actual problem is the disk, it could be the systems accessing and controlling the disk. Or the new version of iTunes could have a bug that is causing it to do something funky with the file storage. Or... yeah, just about anything.
Anyhow, today's his day off and he always takes it personally when a computer he built starts acting up, so he's trying to narrow down the problem and figure out what it would take to fix it4.
So, I don't know what I'm going to find when I get home. I can do most everything I need to do in the next day or so with my laptop, though not having access to some files on the computer while something is being backed up or swapped out would block several projects.
*sigh*
I suspect I'm not going to get my wordcount back up to where I want it on GeneStoFinMo. But I refuse to give up!
1. Okay, as Michael would be the first to tell you, I swear like a sailor for a bit, and then shut down and re-boot. But I also swear at the computer when I click on the wrong icon, or when it takes longer to do something than I think it ought, so just because I'm cursing doesn't mean I think it's a serious problem.
2. About half the time the program locked up has been iTunes.
3. Not terribly surprising, since we are getting disk errors.
4. I refrained from accusing him of setting this up to give him an excuse to upgrade me. You may recall a few months ago I had to track down proof that (at the time) my computer was only eleven months old, because he was absolutly convinced that it was older and I desperately needed an upgrade5.
5. I have before pointed out that he's addicted to updating...
