Tag: hard drive

New Anubis

My just-over-three year old desktop machine was due a replacement. 

    type     |                       name
-------------+---------------------------------------------------
 Motherboard | Asus P6T Deluxe
 CPU         | Intel i7 920 D0 Stepping Retail
 RAM         | OCZ 6GB PC3-12800C8 DDR3 (3x2GB) (OCZ3G1600LV6GK)
 Case        | Lian-Li PC-A71B
 Graphics    | XFX Radeon HD 4890 1GB
 HDD         | Western Digital Caviar Black WD640AALS
 PSU         | Antec TruePower New 650W
 DVD-RW      | LG GH22NS40
 Backup HDD  | Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS
 CPU Cooler  | Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme
 Fan         | Noctua NF-P12 120mm
(11 rows)

Initially, it’ll be running some version of Windows 7 (though I also have a spare Vista license) but given it’s not released there’s no point considering how much that’ll cost for now.

The plan is to put the two WD6401AALSs in a RAID array then backup in some manner to the WD10EADS. Given the price of RAM (£70.99 for 3x2GB), I’m half-tempted to go nuts and have 12GB of RAM.

Some sort of computer-assemblage pr0n to follow – the motherboard and CPU cooler should be with me tomorrow…

New Hard Drive == BSOD == Brown Trousers

On Friday I got a Seagate ST3500320AS – 500GB, SATA2, 32MB cache – and used it to replace the 250GB IDE Western Digital as the Windows boot drive (removing a 120GB WD which used to be the boot drive and became purely for storage when I built this machine a little over 2 years ago).

Used Acronis True Image to copy one drive to the other to dodge installing Windows (last installed 25th April 2006!). All goes well except the next morning, the machine’s back at the login prompt. Fair enough, maybe I restarted the machine and forgot to log in. Until the same happened the next morning…long story short, it turned out that ntbackup.exe was using Volume Shadow Copy, and for whatever reason that made the machine chuck a BAD_POOL_HEADER BSOD.

Much Googling suggested a driver issue, and eventually I found this post on techspot.com, with the following:

  • open regedit from the run menu.
  • goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlClass{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE-10318}
  • Export this key so you have a backup of it. (I know this solves the MSbackup but I don’t know if other problems will pop up.)
  • delete the key “UpperFilters”
  • re-boot
  • My computer did a “Found new hardware” when it re-booted and required another re-boot.
  • Go ahead and re-boot

Worked fine, so I’m happy.