Seagate/Maxtor SeaTools Drive Diagnostic - Problems/Solutions

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I had a hard time testing some new Seagate ST31000340NS drives recently, and here is what I learned.

• Always test new drives ASAP so you can return defective drives within warantee period, and avoid lots of wasted work/installs/reinstalls.
  
• Download the Seagate SeaTools (also works for Maxtor) DOS ISO for drive testing, and burn the CD (I downloaded v2.13B on Jan-7-2009).
• The SeaTools Windows version doesn't generally work in Vista x64 (Known problem). Though a certain hack/fix (from this discussion) might work for you in Vista 64 bit. It worked better for me, but I think my hardware hindered the drive detection.
• Connecting the SATA drive externally via eSATA works great for drive testing (I used a Rosewill eSATA enclosure).
• My A7N8X Deluxe based computer would not boot with the drive attached. After drive detection, the machine hung.
• My P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP based machine booted from the SeaTools CD no problem.
• The SeaTools software must have a floppy disk in the A drive (possibly writeable) or the long test will not complete. After the test, the floppy disk was completely empty. I put the CD and floppy in, then booted.
  
• I ran the Short Test, the Long Test and the Acoustic Test, taking a digital photo of the results of each.
• I also photographed the drive. The photos are for my inventory and testing results.

If you were wondering my new drives tested as flawless.

-AAron

GoodShop, NewEgg and PackageMapping

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I've just ordered some new computer equipment, and I'm rather excited and anxious about it's arrival! But when will that be? I have the UPS tracking number

Firstly I have to say that I've been buying from NewEgg for many years, and they've always been wonderful. Among other things, I've ordered at least 5 motherboards and over 15 hard drives. I point those out because I have received faulty equipment (odds are with that volume that it will happen), but NewEgg support has always been helpful and courteous. I just spoke with them today about a 1 yr old Samsung hard drive that Samsung refused to warantee, to which NewEgg then offered me a full refund. They have great prices, and great service. And you can help a charity dear to my heart if you shop NewEgg from this link:

GoodShop
No additional costs or registration. The charity will be preselected, just select NewEgg or any other store and shop as normal.



Ok, so I've place my order. When will it get here?!?!?!?!
I've just discovered PackageMapping.com, which uses any tracking number and shows you the path and current location of your package on Google Maps! Very cool. I now have a sense for the geographic proximity of my package and how soon it may arrive!

Computer Backups @ Home

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After trying lots of different backup strategies for my home computers, I’ve finally settled on a backup system that is fault, fire and theft tolerant. With a convenient combination of live recovery and offsite backup, I can easily recover from single hard drive failures, and even a complete system loss.

The trick is that I’m using a RAID 1 mirror approach with an extra drive. In this scenario, I’ve got two drives working as one that tolerates the complete loss of one of the drives, and the system continues to operate without interruption. Each week, I power down the systems and remove one of the drives (which is a perfect copy of the other). I then install a drive that I had kept offsite in a safe deposit box at my bank. During the boot process I tell the machine to rebuild the RAID 1 array and overwrite the newly inserted drive. The RAID rebuild doesn’t take much processing power, and a few hours later the machine is back to full redundancy.

At any one time, I have 2 drives in a machine acting as fault tolerance, and a third drive at the bank acting as standby for a complete and total loss disaster. I’ve experimented with my motherboard built in ICH8R hardware assisted RAID controller, and I know that I can easily rebuild from only the offsite drive.

To make the process better, I put mobile drive racks into my 5.25 bays. The rack accepts direct insertion of SATA drives (no sleds needed). I don’t even have to disassemble anything to make the drive swap. These days 500GB drives are cheap, which makes this scheme very affordable.

KINGWIN KF-1000-BK 3.5" Internal hot swap rack ($25)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817990001


OEM 500GB drives ($60-$70)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014%20103530113&bop=And&Order=PRICE


This is arguably not a backup strategy. Considering that I have fault tolerance AND an offsite copy, this simple system satisfies all my needs. The offsite “backup” is about a week old at any one point, but I would suggest that it’s more current, more reliable, more viable and more convenient than most people’s backup strategies. Considering that most people backup by taking hours copying files to an external drive, my backup is basically just pulling the drive out of the machine.

Also consider that my RAID 1 mirror strategy can be used like a Virtual Machine rollback feature. If I wanted to, remove one of the drives, and try arbitrary system changes and software installs. If I didn’t like the result, I could remove the remaining drive, and reinsert the one I had pre-removed. At that point the system would be in pre-experimentation mode. The system would need to rebuild the array, but a small price to pay for having rollback capabilities on a physical machine.

There are some issues/annoyances to this approach. First, when a drive is failing, typical consumer drives make “heroic” attempts to prevent data loss. This means it can take extremely long amounts of time retrying and remapping bad sectors (hard drives are S.M.A.R.T. you know :-) I’ve seen this occur on my systems, and it takes a while to realize why the system is semi-freezing, acting erratic, or possibly not shutting down properly. Once I recognize it, I shut down and run my vendor supplied drive diagnostics to find (and possibly correct) the bad drive. I don’t like any drive problems, but these days the diagnostic software will correct them enough that a warrantee exchange can’t be done. The other annoyance is having to shutdown my systems once a week, and drive to the bank. The systems aren’t down for long and it is a short drive to the bank, but it is slightly annoying. If you wanted to attempt this scheme, you would have to RAID enable your system in some way. Maybe buying a new motherboard, or a PCI card, or external NAS RAID… I can see that being annoying too if you don’t have it already.

With my frequent visits to my safe deposit box in the vault, and bringing my precious data (photo collection, word docs, personal projects, etc…), I feel like it would be cool to have one of those steel secret-agent brief cases handcuffed to my wrist :-)

Note:
I could use an online Internet cloud-based backup solution, but my Honda Civic can transfer 1.5TB of data to/from offsite in about 20 minutes. My cable modem at home can't achieve that type of bandwidth every week :-)

Telemarketers and Robo Callers

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Sigh.

There's only so much attention that I can give to unwanted callers interrupting me during all hours of the day. Whether the attention I give is to annoy them in return, research them on the Internet, provide "public service messages" about the ethics of these callers and the do-not-call list, ... there's just too many annoyances in the world, and giving them any attention at all has become too much.

Although it's interesting to document and blog about "Freedom's watch against Kay Hagan", "Associated Builders Association against Kay Hagan" (both of whom called today), the democratic party doing opinion surveys yesterday, or whatever... I'm done with them. The next time I get a robo message on my voice mail, or a person calls at 9:30pm... I'm done. I'm going to delete the message. I'm going to cut the phone calls short. I'm going to stop blogging about how the do-not-call doesn't stop all the annoying phone calls, and how wrong the whole system is.

I'm done.

What Telemarketer Research ? For WHO ?

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I got ANOTHER call today from a telemarketer claiming market research.

TELL ME YOUR CONCERNS
The call was from Mountain West Research Center (http://www.mwrcenter.com) wanting to ask me about national and local issues facing communities. As I probed for answers about who they were and who would get the results of the survey, the caller could not provided me with an answer on where my responses would end up. Why would anyone volunteer information that may go toward causes or political interests that they do not agree with. For example, lets say that I'm concerned about local businesses losing out to big corporations. Now anyone can bring up that topic to try to sway my opinion, regardless of their real intent. If I said pollution was my national concern, any corporation or political machine would know to how to gain my favor or dollars.

Are you a republican? How would you answer the survey if it was democrats calling?
Are you a democrat? How would you answer the survey if it was republicans calling?

I don't mind giving my opinions in the proper forum, but phone calling blind (which is annoying enough) and not telling me how my answers will be used. Its easy for both friends and enemies to use a person's opinion to sway or coerce them.

As an aside, I asked their company name, location, phone number... they told me they didn't have a phone number, that they were calling from the Internet (how ridiculous is that?).

YOU LIKE PET FOOD?
I had a different call recently (at 9:00 pm) researching my views on pet food products. They too weren't selling anything and felt the Do-Not-Call list didn't apply to them. I kept them on the line for a while asking about who was paying for and receiving the survey. As they said the survey results would be free, I asked them to send me the results. They then said it was not free, to which I asked who was paying for it. I had the guy talking in circles before he suggested I speak with his supervisor. The supervisor was rather unapologetic about calling anyone and about not revealing who was getting the survey. My point with these people was that it WAS a commercial phone call, and that they shouldn't be able to call me due to the Do-Not-Call List.

YOUR HOMEWORK
When they call YOU, be sure to get any identifying information so that you can look them up on the Internet, and blog about them. Get company name, address, phone number anything you can search on. Also insist that they tell you where your information is going, and who is paying for it. Good luck.

Enterprise Library Logging with WMI

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In Enterprise Library for Microsoft (EntLib v3.1), you can use the WMI TraceListener (WMITraceListener class) to send logging events/statistics to the Windows Performance Monitor application.

Steps:

1. Enable Instrumentation on the host: Start / All Programs / Microsoft Patterns & Practices / Enteprise Library 3.1 - May 2007 / Install Instrumentation
   
2. With Enterprise Library Configuration, configure your app.config or web.config to use the WMI TraceListener.
3. With Enterprise Library Configuration, add Instrumentation
4. Edit the resulting config file (from previous steps) to set the instrumentation properties to "true": <instrumentationconfiguration performanceCountersEnabled="true"
   eventLoggingEnabled="true" wmiEnabled="true" />
5. If you have subclassed LogEntry, make sure any custom typed Attributes are decorated with [IgnoreMember] (you'll have to have System.Management as a Reference)
6. Run your program
   
7. Add a new Counter in Windows Performance Monitor: Performance Object "Enterprise Library Logging Counter"; Select counters from list; Select your program's instance.

Troubleshooting:

• If "Enterprise Library Logging Counter" isn't available in Performance Monitor, then you didn't Install Instrumentation in EntLib.
• If you can't select an instance while adding the Counter, then your program probably isn't running, or something is preventing it from being instrumentable
• If the application event log contains errors suggesting that you use IgnoreMember, then you are logging a subclassed EventLog that has Attributes with special types (the event log error will say which one). Or change the type of you attributes to string, int, etc... to avoid the problem.
  

Don't Give to Rude Telemarketers

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Hey Telemarketers!
Telemarketers, when you call me midday or in the evenings, I am not happy or receptive to your message... but I am polite. I generally will try to end the call gracefully. If you are rude to me, then I start to question why I am being polite to you.

Fraternal Order of Police
Yesterday evening I received a call from the Fraternal Order of Police, asking for a donation to their noble cause. I listened and waited for a chance to reply and when I calmly said "no thank you" they immediately hung up.
Today, to my surprise, I received another call from the Fraternal Order of Police (in the afternoon). I interrupted the telemarketer a few times to make sure that I was talking with the same organization, as I made notes. Then I interrupted again and said that they had called yesterday and were rather rude to me. I conveyed that they hung up on me after I had politely refused. As this telemarketer tried to break in, I said that I was NOT happy with them, and I hung up. I'm surprised that I was able to hang up on them before they hung up on me.

March of Dimes
I like the intent of this organization, but their fund raising efforts are ruthless. The March of Dimes has called my house asking for my wife... I'll ask who they are. After they respond I tell them that my wife isn't around, but I can help them. At that point they tend to hang up without further response. Later (sometimes hours, sometimes days) they call back, identified by caller ID, and hang up quickly when they find out that my wife isn't available. To me, that's rude and devious. It is also impossible to get off their mailing list.

Not Over the Phone
Additionally, stop insisting that I give right now! I tell anyone who calls that I do not make donation decisions over the phone. Send me information in the mail, and I'll make my decisions casually when I sit down to pay bills. I've had telemarketers hang up when I tell them that I do not commit to donations over the phone, but that I would like them to send information to me.

Who are the Telemarketers Helping? Themselves?
Some of the telemarketers that call me are not doing justice to the charities that they represent. Either through poor phone etiquette, or not providing a high enough percentage back to the charity. The telemarketers that are now blocked by do-not-call lists seem to have moved to calling for charities. They see the potential for raising money for a charity, the potential to get around the do-not-call list, and a way to make profits again. I've asked some of the telemarketers that call me about what percentage goes to the charity... some don't know, some are low percentages, and others are more reasonable. I don't know how March of Dimes works, but do your own googling on the telemarketers calling for Fraternal Order of Police... I've seen horrible reports stating the charity gets as low as 12%. All of these comments are about the telemarketers representing the charities. I'm sure the charities are worth while, but ask some questions and do some quick research (Google) before you give to any charity through a second party service (ex: what percent goes to the charity?)... that's why I don't make decisions over the phone!

Give, but Not to Telemarketers
I do suggest that everyone find a charity they feel is deserving, and find a comfortable way to donate to them. Each year I tithe to our church and give to some charities. I'm also on the board of NathanCan Foundation (NathanCan.org) working to help chronically sick kids. If I weren't giving or directly participating in a charity, I'd feel like this entire discussion was merely an excuse not to give anyone anything... but there ARE good and deserving causes out there, and GOOD ways to donate.