[ale] [OT] - system crapped out

[JD]

This is an ideal reason to deploy a virtual machine.
Decouple the hardware from the OS.
Move all the disk redundancy to the hostOS.

As/If more compute power is needed in the future, moving the disk image to a
faster host (still running a VM server), is all that it should take.

Of course, the HostOS would be some sort of Linux, right?  Probably a Xen or
KVM-based deployment to avoid costly license fees.



 ... see how I brought it back On-Topic?




On 12/06/2012 03:53 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> This is OT because the base system here is a zillion year old XP box (don't ask
> - software won't run on new crap)
> 
> system became unresponsive to keyboard (USB) on the main connection on mobo but
> worked on front panel connectors. Then those quit.
> 
> Clearly a hardware issue.
> 
> Noticed smell of overheated electronics from power supply so replaced it.
> System had trouble booting but was OK going into safe mode.
> 
> 2 main drives in RAID 1 on a 3ware sata RAID card. System not happy about being
> shutdown uncleanly (many crashes before I was called) and ran a full chckdsk /r
> on boot drives which reported no errors.
> System will auto-reboot on normal startup at splash screen and now complains
> about new hardware (3ware controller!) in safe-mode. The RAID controller(s) were
> not changed so maybe a bit of drive scramble in that sector. Time to reload
> drivers. woo.
> 
> Original driver disk nowhere to be found so using latest download from LSI (2009
> - about when the controller card went in) to add driver to OS drive(s).
> 
> Can't. Installer requires a VC++ something that requires the windows installer
> to run. But safe mode won't run the windows installer.
> 
> reboot and cuss. Try floppy image - dug out usb floppy and found a single
> working floppy disk (thought I had tossed all of those?). Install would run but
> reboot asked for drivers again.
> 
> cuss more when safe-mode now automatically reboots on startup. No way to access
> system drives anymore.
> 
> Replace motherboard, CPU, RAM, CD drive and power supply. Boots to safe mode
> (YAY!) for new driver install. But original drivers for both RAID cards (other
> is an adaptec with a mirror pair with application data) were now needing to be
> installed. Plus now need to "re-authenticate" (cuss. spit.)
> 
> ????  How are the originally working 3 days ago drivers vanishing ????
> 
> unplug EVERYTHING, all drives, all raid cards, and try to boot from a known good
> XP hard drive built on a different system
> 
> It does the same thing as the other drives! Gets to the XP splash screen then
> reboots the systems.
> 
> F8 - set no restart on error - no change, set debug mode - just restarts with no
> messages
> 
> Insert original installation CD to try for recovery console - blue screens after
> _long_ fight to get driver disk (see floppy) to work.
> 
> Try newer XP-SP3 disk - blue screens
> 
> memtest says all RAM is just fine (single pass all tests).
> 
> W   T   F   !!!!!?????!!!!!?????
>