Category Archives: Computing

Microsoft Rust

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I have forever claimed to be tolerant of Microsoft products.  As a user of both Windows and Unix based operating systems for many years, I can say I’ve seen both sides of this particular battle.  I give both Microsoft and Unix credit for many things, and I see tremendous superiority on both sides, but in different areas.

Unix stands as the true lineage of virtually all computing.  It represents an operating system worth using when the choices were non-existent.  To that end, they have a bit longer history than their personal computing counterparts, and thanks to a deft avoidance for a great many years (intentionally or otherwise) of personal computing, their focus was vastly different.  Operating systems spawned like rabbits over the ideas of networking, speed, efficiency, flexibility, and above all, stability.  Craziness like unifying them into a single operating system or end user happiness with pretty graphics were left out entirely.

Microsoft stands in my mind as the effective godfather of personal computing.  Without the near monopoly status of Windows (and of course DOS before that) as a computer platform, software development would simply never have gotten to where it is today.  Only in a world dominated by a single unified platform is it possible to sell a single product to so many people.  If Unix had its way, there would be 700 flavors of an operating system each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and each with an equal market share.  Imagine what software engineering would be if a single product had to be made so many times to make it work on each platform instead of the reality provided by Microsoft.  Write it once and instantly have literally millions of people available on your supported platform to sell it to.

For these reasons, Windows became pretty.  It learned to support the amazing amount of consumer level hardware.  It sidestepped durability and stability in lieu of usability.  In a word, it created the face of computing most of us know.  Unix continued to become faster and leaner and solid as a rock, but paid a price most fans argue was no real loss.  The price of usability.  Commands entered in some text mode console or other consisting of almost random pairs of letters predominated the operating system.  A graphical front end showed all the signs of being an after-thought.  It was ugly, slow, and offered some hardcore features that all but the most extreme of users would never need and usually they never even knew those features existed.

The battle raged on.  Swears and smearing of reputations from fanboys on both sides abound.  I stand on my soap box to proclaim loudly, “who cares?”  Both camps have their places.  Both have done greate things to the world of computing.  That’s good enough for me.

This story begins with a computer that is relatively new, running Windows XP x64.  Things worked for a while, I managed to avoid the problems you hear about all the time with Vista, and I got to enjoy the clean speed and smoothness of a GUI almost everyone is familier with at this point in history.  Basically every version of Windows ever created has a problem I’ve come to call “Rust.”  In simple terms, the usable life expectancy of a computer running Windows is limited by the fact that Windows will eventually clutter itself up into not working correctly.  The rust can be washed away by simply wiping the computer clean and reinstalling everything.  Not a task for the weak, and certainly not for the people that merely use computers instead of managing them.  It gets worse however.  The rust itself can, if not detected soon enough, get bad enough to all but entirely prevent proper data backups which are a crucial step in reinstalling.

In my case the rust manifested itself as a sudden inability to burn DVD’s.  I use DVD’s as backups of almost everything important to me.  They are cheap, durable, and store a relatively decent amount of information.  My symptom was my burning software claiming drive incompatibility with the discs I was using.  Not especially likely considering how many of them I’ve burned with this drive and software combonation.  If that wasn’t good enough, it also locked up my computer, wouldn’t let the disc out of the drive until a reboot, and neatly produced an impressive number of coasters as I tried adjusting my configuration over and over.

Fortunately I have a solid local network and several computers.  My backups would have to go over that instead of onto DVD’s while I got this situation figured out.  A swift evening of reinstalling my operating system, setting up my drivers and restoring backups back over the network fixed literally everything.  By swift of course I mean “it was running in a couple hours” and “it had everything I need back on it within about a week.”  Naturally adding things back is was on an “as needed” basis.

RAID Sadness

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In the world of high powered computing there are almost as many creative ways to squeak a little more out of your computer as there are people out there to think of them. Some people happily put their computer at risk by forcing its parts to operate faster than they were designed to in a method known as overclocking. Others take the road of simply spending huge amounts of money to stay on the bleeding edge of hardware. With the latest generation of CPUs running as high as $1500 a pop, that can become an expensive pattern to follow very quickly. Truly creative users see ways to stay within the bounds of reason financially and while maintaining some amount of hardware stability.

One way to go about that is to simply add a second video card, assuming you have a motherboard that allows it. Another is to upgrade your hard drives to some form of RAID array to make the load times of your games or your overall throughput of data way higher. A RAID array is basically just a collection of hard drives working together as one. An expensive alternative to RAID would be a relatively new device known as a solid state disk drive (SSD). They are way lower in capacity but make up for that shortcoming by being both way faster and way more expensive. To RAID some SSD’s together would be terrifyingly fast, but may exceed the national deficit in purchase price. Today’s story is about my RAID array.

Not feeling especially wealthy at the moment, and thus not inclined to run out and drop $800 on a wimpy 32GB of SSD even if it is way faster, I decided to pick up a pair of 750GB hard drives and build them into a nice RAID array. The goal was a single 1.5TB striped volume for only $240. My motherboard supports up to 6 SATA devices and has build in RAID support for those devices. Prior to adding the 2 new drives I was using only 3 of the 6 SATA devices I could support. This seemed to me to be the easiest and most cost effective way to beat a little more horse power out of my computer, with the added advantage of huge amounts of extra space.

Installing the drives was the typical pain in the butt that comes along with the process of trying to make all the wires in a computer lay in friendly places without being eaten by cooling fans. Once they were in though I figured I was only a few minutes away from enjoying my new speed and storage capacity. I fired up the BIOS, enabled RAID for the new drives, saved my settings, entered the RAID config, created a striped volume, saw on the screen a nice new striped 1.5TB array that was reported as healthy, exited the RAID program, and saw a gray blinking cursor.

That’s all I saw. Ever.

Wait for a while. Reboot over and over. Repeat every imaginable permutation of the configuration steps. It didn’t matter what I tried, my computer finished it’s power on self test (POST) and left me staring at a blandly colored short horizontal line blinking at regular intervals. The theory was that Windows itself was getting confused, but that was really hard to prove since I couldn’t even get the computer to boot.

Eventually, frustrated that I would never in fact stumble on to the pattern of configurations that would allow my computer to work like a computer again, I decided to turn off RAID and see how it all went. No problems, all the way into Windows, but with 2 extra 750GB hard drives. While this clearly worked at giving me more hard drive space, it failed miserably at getting the speed improvements I was looking for. So I began downloading improved drivers for Windows and new BIOS for my computer to attack the problem from as many sides as ended up being required. New drivers installed and BIOS tucked away on a USB thumb drive, I rebooted a few times to see if I could make Windows happy with RAID enabled.

More with the gray blinking cursor of extreme sadness. Well, at this point it was time to bring out the really big guns. Time to flash the BIOS to see if there was anything I could do from that perspective as far as making this project reach its finish line. Using the BIOS flash utility conveniently built right into the BIOS, I confirmed my BIOS, confirmed the BIOS I was about to install, let it install, successfully validated it, and watched happily as my computer rebooted. Except it didn’t come back.

Nothing happened. The computer didn’t POST, it didn’t beep, it didn’t show anything on the monitor, just nothing. I rebooted a bunch of times. I tried to turn off the power supply. I even popped out the battery. I was stuck, and my computer was now better at being a doorstop than a computer. This adventure in sadness had just taken an unexpected turn to downright terribleness. I was left with no choice. I called up Asus and waited on hold for over 30 minutes to ask them what to do. They provided me a specific pattern to follow involving the power supply, a jumper, and the battery. I followed it to the letter, and powered up my computer again. This time with it doing things it was supposed to do and the newly installed BIOS was there waiting for me.

Even with RAID enabled I no longer got stuck at the gray blinking cursor of death. This adventure however isn’t over just yet. Windows would boot up, but the RAIDed drives were simply missing. There were only a few unknown devices in the hardware manager to indicate that the computer knew they existed at all. Thus, the fancy new RAID drivers had proven to be somewhat useless, and entirely not fancy. More surfing the net, but on a computer that was unbelievably unstable thanks to a very confused SATA bus, more downloading of RAID drivers from other places, all to no avail. At the end of the day, I was forced to use the version of the drivers directly off the motherboard DVD, but I had to install them through Windows and find them on the disc manually instead of using the supplied driver install tools.

After a few more random reboots, a bit more instability, and some formatting of a drive that looked to be 1.5TB I decided to run a quick hard drive benchmark to see how I did. Thankfully, for comparison purposes, the hard drives I had in the computer before this experiment were almost identical to the ones I had just added so I had a solid basis for comparison. At the end of the day, the RAID array was almost exactly twice as fast as the drives were when not RAIDed together. I would call this a victory, even if a stressful and drawn out one.