Of a non-flaming nature. You know, the good stuff. Real, live, non-partisan technical support.
I ran into a little problem a couple of hours ago, and it sure would be nice to get a few expert opinions on the probable cause.
I just went through some of the weirdest stuff I've ever experienced on a computer ... and I have no idea why.
I was just about to finish up for the night, and I decided to run Norton AntiVirus before I went to bed.
I left the room for a minute, and when I came back, there was a box on the screen. At first, I thought the program had found a virus. That would have been a first for me.
Instead, the box told me that one of my hard drives had been disconnected, and said that if I needed a manual method to connect/disconnect the drive, Windows would put an icon in the System tray for that purpose. It didn't mention <i>which</i> drive.
Well, since these are fixed disks, I said no. Behind that window, I found that Norton had posted a message that told me it could not scan the F: partition because it was in use by the Operating System.
I rebooted, and found out that the second hard drive (Primary Slave) was missing in Windows. It was listed in the Device Manager, but the name of the drive was garbled. Instead of being identified as an IBM-DTLA-307075 hard drive, it said: ABE-DTDA07075. Then I checked, and discovered that the second partition on the first hard drive was also identified strangely. Although it was visible, and the drive letter was correct, the size of the partition was only half the normal size. (My drives are: First drive: C & E, Second drive: D & F.) E was 7.76GB, instead of 14.3GB. D & F were just not there. C was identified correctly.
So I rebooted, went into the BIOS, and the second hard drive was identified as an ABE-DTDA07075 in there, too! And it was set up as a 7GB drive. It <i>should</i> have been 73308MB.
I began to trip out about this point. Formatting wasn't the answer, because the drive was screwed up in the BIOS, as well as Windows. This BIOS has no IDE auto-detect function, so I couldn't change much of anything. All I could think of to do was clear the CMOS, boot into Windows without the drive attached ... shut down, reattach the drive, and hope that the BIOS could identify it correctly afterwards.
Well, that worked. The drives were all identified correctly, and the partition sizes were normal. But after I got into the GUI ... I discovered that the BlackIce firewall program was dead. I had to go into Safe Mode to remove it. But a fresh installation of the program was a failure. It would install ... but refused to function afterwards.
You really shouldn't run ADSL without a firewall of some sort ... so I decided to give ZoneAlarmPro a shot. I tried to re-download the installation file from the online store where I bought it a few months ago ... but the store was dead and gone. Eventually, after searching through 4 or 5 CD's I found the installation file, got it installed, and quickly updated the program before it caused Win2k to blue screen. That worked, too. Of course, Windows didn't want to shut down, and I had to hit the reset button, but everything seems to be alright now, except for the Logical Disk Administrative Service, which was nearly useless anyway. But it did control a viewer that let me view the "health" of the hard drives, and it's strange that it thinks that there are no devices associated with it!
Speculation. My first thought was that Norton corrupted the Master Boot Records on the hard drive, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They appear to be intact. My second thought was that I had gotten a virus, and it had attacked Norton. That remains to be seen. Something definitely screwed up the BIOS ... and it might have been Norton, because that was the only active, running program when the problems started. If so ... now I'm paranoid about running a manual scan with the AntiVirus program ... I don't need to go through all of this a second time.
And now I'm also worried that this might happen again, right out of the blue, with no warning!
I wonder if the AntiVirus program has received an update that was corrupted or hacked, somehow?
Maybe there's some kind of bug in the IDE controller drivers. Perhaps the firewall program interfered with Norton, or vice versa? Who knows?
All I know is that it is running right now, and that the machine had given me no indication that there was a problem in advance, of any kind. In fact, I had been very pleased with the way it had been behaving, and had considered sitting down tomorrow to make a new set of imaged disks. But not now. Instead, I'll be backing up the old-fashioned way, just in case the second drive decides to suddenly fail and take my data with it.
Anyone have any ideas on why this happened, and if so, what I can do to prevent it from happening again?
What I would give for just one normal, IRQ conflict! I'm sick and tired of running machines that suddenly freak out for no good reason! One good, well-documented error message that makes some kind of sense would really brighten my day.
I'm going to bed now. Wish me luck.
Toejam31
<font color=purple>My Rig:</font color=purple> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847</A>
I ran into a little problem a couple of hours ago, and it sure would be nice to get a few expert opinions on the probable cause.
I just went through some of the weirdest stuff I've ever experienced on a computer ... and I have no idea why.
I was just about to finish up for the night, and I decided to run Norton AntiVirus before I went to bed.
I left the room for a minute, and when I came back, there was a box on the screen. At first, I thought the program had found a virus. That would have been a first for me.
Instead, the box told me that one of my hard drives had been disconnected, and said that if I needed a manual method to connect/disconnect the drive, Windows would put an icon in the System tray for that purpose. It didn't mention <i>which</i> drive.
Well, since these are fixed disks, I said no. Behind that window, I found that Norton had posted a message that told me it could not scan the F: partition because it was in use by the Operating System.
I rebooted, and found out that the second hard drive (Primary Slave) was missing in Windows. It was listed in the Device Manager, but the name of the drive was garbled. Instead of being identified as an IBM-DTLA-307075 hard drive, it said: ABE-DTDA07075. Then I checked, and discovered that the second partition on the first hard drive was also identified strangely. Although it was visible, and the drive letter was correct, the size of the partition was only half the normal size. (My drives are: First drive: C & E, Second drive: D & F.) E was 7.76GB, instead of 14.3GB. D & F were just not there. C was identified correctly.
So I rebooted, went into the BIOS, and the second hard drive was identified as an ABE-DTDA07075 in there, too! And it was set up as a 7GB drive. It <i>should</i> have been 73308MB.
I began to trip out about this point. Formatting wasn't the answer, because the drive was screwed up in the BIOS, as well as Windows. This BIOS has no IDE auto-detect function, so I couldn't change much of anything. All I could think of to do was clear the CMOS, boot into Windows without the drive attached ... shut down, reattach the drive, and hope that the BIOS could identify it correctly afterwards.
Well, that worked. The drives were all identified correctly, and the partition sizes were normal. But after I got into the GUI ... I discovered that the BlackIce firewall program was dead. I had to go into Safe Mode to remove it. But a fresh installation of the program was a failure. It would install ... but refused to function afterwards.
You really shouldn't run ADSL without a firewall of some sort ... so I decided to give ZoneAlarmPro a shot. I tried to re-download the installation file from the online store where I bought it a few months ago ... but the store was dead and gone. Eventually, after searching through 4 or 5 CD's I found the installation file, got it installed, and quickly updated the program before it caused Win2k to blue screen. That worked, too. Of course, Windows didn't want to shut down, and I had to hit the reset button, but everything seems to be alright now, except for the Logical Disk Administrative Service, which was nearly useless anyway. But it did control a viewer that let me view the "health" of the hard drives, and it's strange that it thinks that there are no devices associated with it!
Speculation. My first thought was that Norton corrupted the Master Boot Records on the hard drive, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They appear to be intact. My second thought was that I had gotten a virus, and it had attacked Norton. That remains to be seen. Something definitely screwed up the BIOS ... and it might have been Norton, because that was the only active, running program when the problems started. If so ... now I'm paranoid about running a manual scan with the AntiVirus program ... I don't need to go through all of this a second time.
And now I'm also worried that this might happen again, right out of the blue, with no warning!
I wonder if the AntiVirus program has received an update that was corrupted or hacked, somehow?
Maybe there's some kind of bug in the IDE controller drivers. Perhaps the firewall program interfered with Norton, or vice versa? Who knows?
All I know is that it is running right now, and that the machine had given me no indication that there was a problem in advance, of any kind. In fact, I had been very pleased with the way it had been behaving, and had considered sitting down tomorrow to make a new set of imaged disks. But not now. Instead, I'll be backing up the old-fashioned way, just in case the second drive decides to suddenly fail and take my data with it.
Anyone have any ideas on why this happened, and if so, what I can do to prevent it from happening again?
What I would give for just one normal, IRQ conflict! I'm sick and tired of running machines that suddenly freak out for no good reason! One good, well-documented error message that makes some kind of sense would really brighten my day.
I'm going to bed now. Wish me luck.
Toejam31
<font color=purple>My Rig:</font color=purple> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847</A>
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