sata

System Untable?

Here’s the scenario. You have this PC, its unstable, but you have ran all the proper diagnostics and cannot come up with an issue… When was the last time a software issue cause a hard lock of a PC? That’s right it hardly happens. Your diagnosed the hardware, but you’ve been leaving all the same interconnects in i.e. power cables, ide cables, sata cable, etc. I have seen in the past a system running, but being unstable because of a SATA cable, so replace the cable and re-run the tests, set the PC through its paces. Sisoftware has a pretty good burn-in utility that can stress all the major components. If the PC makes it through the burn-in, then your in the clear…or are you?

NS

ESX 3.5, IDE, and Me

What the heck am I talking about you say? Well I decided to load ESX 3.5 on a workstation of mine. This is so I could do a test upgrade from 3.5 to 3.5 Patch 3, mainly because I want to make sure VMFS and the VMs are retained after upgrading to said patch level.

So I commenced installing ESX 3.5 on my 40GB IDE drive, yeah I said IDE, who uses those anymore anyways, apparently I do. The install went fine, for the most part, until it said that I wouldn’t be able to use the current drive as a datastore (without advanced configuration). Anyways on I go, I finish the install and all is fine. I was able to connect using Virtual Infrastructure Client, but then I see the message that ViC could not find any static storage, click here to configure a datastore. I clicked on the link and of course nothing was there… did some searching and it turns out that ESX 3.5 does not support IDE drives as a datastore due to the fact that NCQ(native command queuing) is missing from IDE Drive, however SATA drives will work fine. So what I ended up doing is I just installed a 80GB Sata drive, yes small i know, but its only for testing purposes, and rebooted the ESX machine, from ViC. Upon rebooting it found the new hardware and I was able to use ViC to add the new datastore… all 80GBs of it, all right!

Moral of the story… SATA/SCSI okay, IDE not okay

Till next time,

NS

Slow system…?

Well have you ever checked the hardware monitor section in your BIOS, this will show you what your powersupply is running at along with Fan speeds and CPU Temperatures. If left unchecked most BIOS’ will not warn when there is an issue with the powersupply, depending on the severity of course. For instance I had this Pentium D System, Pentium 4 at 3.6Ghz, running a SATA STRIPE. The Chipset was Nforce4. The 550watt power supply installed was made by Antech. A pretty good system considering it was 1 year old. We decided to install Windows XP x64 Edition and immediately noticed slow downs and programs wouldn’t install properly. Well we tinkered with some settings for a while and finally decided to pull the plug, wish I would have done it earlier, but hey hindsight is 20/20 right? No ones perfect.

Anyways the moral of the story is that the powersupply wasn’t supplying the mainboard with the proper amount of voltage in the 5V range, it was out by more then 5% and that is bad for the motherboard, CPU, and I/O.

We ended up replacing the powersupply and the 5V voltage was now stable.

Unfortunately well have to reinstall the OS, as there is some residual corruption. Can someone say FORMAT!!!

NS