This was not a nice weekend! I replaced two hard drives and a power supply...

J

JCitron

Trainzing since 12-2003
Yup. Just as the title says...

When I built my new PC a few months ago, I carried over my case, with the power supply, and hard disks which I was using before. Perhaps I should have spent the extra dough up front and got new drives and a power supply, but why would I have to? They all seemed to be working well at the time, and had never given me a problem before. Anyway, the system kept crashing while in Trainz. I initially thought it was bad video drivers, DirectX versus Open/GL, etc., I updated to the latest ones for NVidia, which didn't help so I reinstalled Trainz, and everything ran fine afterwards. Then last Friday, while in the middle of editing a session, my system rebooted! Huh? What!? I checked the Event Viewer and saw nothing. There was no mention of what happen, which means that the OS didn't have a chance to write anything to the event log. This is not a good thing because it makes finding the problem more difficult. It seems that when problems strike, I get the nasty ones.

After that reboot, I then went back into Trainz and everything was fine for the rest of the day. Saturday was fine until later in the evening when the system rebooted again on me while on the web. At this point, I thought there was a script virus. Those nasty ActiveX script bugs that cause browsers to lock up and systems to reboot. I ran a virus scan and saw nothing. I ran multiple products, and my system was clean. I even ran some rather esoteric root kit scanners, and still found nothing! Figuring there was a RAM problem, I then ran Memtst86 for memory errors. After running for over 7 passes, overnight, nothing was found. From what I've read, and experienced, if the test passes for at least 7 cycles, then it's a pretty good chance that the RAM is good.

Sunday, I was in Outlook, and the system locked. The boot drive started chattering, buzzing and clicking, and then the system rebooted. I scheduled a chkdsk /R (Repair), and the system ran until it froze at stage 4/5 at around 72%. It then rebooted and did the chkdsk all over again and locked up at the same place. Hmm.... bad drive. I replaced the older hard drive with a new one. I initially thought about an SSD, but I want enterprise-class drives for reliability, but they're way too expensive still! I put in a 2TB Western Digital and everything seemed fine. Windows 7 installed without a hitch, and everything was up and running in about three hours. I didn't lose any data because I don't have my data folders on the boot drive. This was a smart move on my part, and saved me quite a bit of rebuilding time because there was no need to copy stuff off the system first. When everything was up and running, I started up Content Manager, and the program froze. I figured that the crashing might have corrupted the assets.tdx file. After the repair, while in the middle of a good session, the program crashed and the system rebooted! This hard drive started clicking and making other weird noises! I ran chkdsk on this drive, and the drive froze. Another bad drive?

I copied my data off, in between now more frequent reboots, and got my stuff to my internal back up drive. I had tried writing to my USB 3.0 external drive, but that was corrupted from a reboot during a copy to that drive, and it no longer showed up in My Computer and showed up as an unknown drive in the Storage Manager. I figured that it was a safe bet to copy stuff off this drive no matter what, and I did as much as I could between reboots until it completed. By Monday afternoon, I had copied my 1.5 TB of data (500 MB of Trainz stuff plus my other data) to my other internal drive. This was a new drive, by the way, so I wasn't concerned about needing to replace it.

The system then rebooted again randomly while reading mail. This sent me on another trip, to my less than favorite electronics store, Best Buy where I picked up a Thermaltake 850W power supply, and an new drive for my data. After replacing the power supply, the system stopped rebooting. The new drives run quietly and very quickly. Some forensic testing on drives showed they had problems. As soon as I powered up the old data drive, it chattered and clicked loudly. When I accessed it through my external drive bay, the system froze. The old boot drive was not much better. This drive was really, really slow as well as very noisy. I suppose the bad power supply may have helped bring them over the edge, but it's hard to tell at this point. The drives had logged close to 10,000 hours on them, according to Crystal Drive Info, and they had been in constant operation for the past 4 years. The power supply was only 4-1/2 years old and comes with a 5 warranty. At this point, I'm not even going to bother to warranty the old power supply. The old unit is quite big compared to the new one, and was a noisier both power and fan noise wise.

What did I get out of this? When building a new system, replace everything. It's not worth trying to salvage any older parts because I ended up wasting a weekend, and probably spent a lot more money from Best Buy than I would have if I had gotten the parts at New Egg.

John
 
Hi John,

Moral of the story: "They do not make them the way they used to any more..." Being a specialist computer and network engineer, I look after diagnostic machines with PCs some having 486 CPUs, how is that! Newer machines tend to keel over in 3-5 years if enterprise parts are not used. The worst are PSUs, mainboards, then odd RAM and hard disk.

:eek:

Regards, Mimes
 
Solution, get a Mac! ;)

Sorry to hear about your pain John, good to hear that you don’t seem to have lost vital data. Not needed just before Christmas (or festival of your choice), but a frustration when it happens at anytime.

Merry Christmas anyway :)
 
Almost 11-years now looking at the date on the thread!

The system is long gone now. Those nasty hits eventually took their toll on the motherboard and causing other latent failures later, and the motherboard eventually died completely in 2016 when the USB ports stopped working. I kept the case and got an even better power supply. The replacement motherboard that was installed in 2016 died due to some unknown issues and the complete kit was replaced by a prebuilt Dell computer because a complete system costs as much as a video card these days.
 
It may be that temperature is a "wear factor". While the CPU temps are ok some other component may be setting in a low air flow area. Just blowing air into the case is not enough if circulation patterns leave some items with less moving air.
 
boleyd said:
It may be that temperature is a "wear factor". While the CPU temps are ok some other component may be setting in a low air flow area. Just blowing air into the case is not enough if circulation patterns leave some items with less moving air.
Click to expand...
True but this was a "sudden wear factor" caused by a bad power supply zapping the board. The problem is those latent failures are nasty little creatures to troubleshoot because there's no correlation back to what caused the failure in the first place. As a tech, I always looked for the cause of the problem and didn't just fix the problem and moved on. I learned a lot about circuitry and I think part of this came out of my initial EE background I was going for in college but decided on the technician side of things instead. It's not a matter of just fixing, it's a matter of why did this happened and this led me to an eventual position as a R&D lab tech and QA technician.

Anyway, latent failures occur much later after the initial cause. A component or board can be damaged ever so slightly - just enough so that everything appears to work fine but eventually the components fail at a later date. The data can be weeks, months, or even years later long removed from the initial damage. I saw this play out a couple of times due to lightning hits. In my IT career three facilities were hit by lightning. The first building, an old Polaroid facility located on the side of Prospect Hill in Waltham, was a prime target. The flagpole had missing paint where the lightning would hit it and the offices right outside that flagpole had dead outlets and network ports.

One July morning, I came into the office to find a whole floor of dead laptops and dead docking stations. The laptops that died were the ones the users had left in the office overnight while those that survived only had dead docking stations whose network ports were completely fried. Also on that side of the building were many machines that appeared unaffected by the big ZAP. Eventually, the so-called unaffected machines died one by one. Some had RAM failures while others had hard disks that failed. The failures occurred within weeks of the hit. Initially, I just replaced the RAM and hard drives, and eventually motherboards without thinking back to the initial hit then it dawned on me that this was caused by the lightning.

The same company division was sold and we moved to a new building in 2000. In 2004 while sitting at my desk, I noticed the sky looked funky in the distance and checked the weather on the internet. There were storms predicted for later on but the sun was still out although poking through some clouds. I went into the computer room to check on a CD backup I was running for a manager. We had lost some employees and I would backup local hard disks to CDs and hand those to the managers in case they needed access to the data. Just as I came out of the computer room there was a huge explosion and flash outside the windows along with people screaming. Lightning had struck the transformer, blew that into bits and the zap took out the building electric meters! Taking out the electric meters was an understatement. There was a fire in the electric closet and smoke all over. We ended up using a mobile phone to call 911 because the phone system was offline.

The UPS were screaming away in the computer room when I opened the door and I shut down the systems and turned them off. We recovered from the zap the next day and then I found problems. One by one, those computers closest to the side of the building that got hit, died. One failure was RAM, others were hard disks and motherboards. They didn't all happen at once. In the computer room, one of the big UPSs died and in another office a power strip was charred. We also lost network ports and a switch in the wiring closet a short time later.
 
frogpipe said:
Those new "related" links keep taking me to ancient threads and I didnt check the date stamp. Ugh.
Click to expand...
Hmm, can't say now if I did or not.
This defective body was being a bit difficult to get along with yesterday afternoon and night after doing okay in the AM, might have read that 2013 as 2023.
Lightning is powerful stuff.
 
on30gn15 said:
Hmm, can't say now if I did or not.
This defective body was being a bit difficult to get along with yesterday afternoon and night after doing okay in the AM, might have read that 2013 as 2023.
Lightning is powerful stuff.
Click to expand...
Lightning is definitely powerful stuff. I've been out severe storm chasing and I've seen it melt power poles to the ground.

Don't feel bad about resurrecting old forum posts. We've all done it since the new forums bring up the similar threads thing.
 
I have nothing to back this up, except a career fixing organs in peoples homes, but I came to believe the EMP was part of the lightning damage equation. I had several cases over the years where replacing the $20,000 organ was not a option and even when protected or actually unplugged damage occurred - and then kept happening for months or years afterward.

A switching diode here, a logic chip there, silicon would fail over and over while the exact same model without the lightning encounter hummed along without any such issues for decades.
 
frogpipe said:
I have nothing to back this up, except a career fixing organs in peoples homes, but I came to believe the EMP was part of the lightning damage equation. I had several cases over the years where replacing the $20,000 organ was not a option and even when protected or actually unplugged damage occurred - and then kept happening for months or years afterward.

A switching diode here, a logic chip there, silicon would fail over and over while the exact same model without the lightning encounter hummed along without any such issues for decades.
Click to expand...
That's absolutely possible. In the last place that was hit by lightning, about a dozen wireless headsets were damaged that were in the offices on the top floor on the side of the building that was it by the zap and were closest to the windows.

In addition to the headsets, some wireless access points took a hit and one or two lamps also on that side of the building. Since the users had their laptop computers with them, they were not
damaged.

Since the headsets were not plugged into an outlet, the only thing that could kill them was definitely an EMP caused by the lightning.
 
So, is the conclusion that even those items that are unplugged and with no antennas, etc. will be effected by the lightning hit? It is probably the very strong (high intensity) pulse that sets up currents in all conducting materials which is death to electronic devices. You could build a metal clad closet to house critical items such as a personal PC but all that metal will become red hot from the pulse and ignite the shielded closet. I would guess that underground wiring is best but I have not seen any data on ground penetration of EMP.

I have all underground wiring out to the street pole about 100 yards away. No way to tell if that is enough since the power of a natural EMP can vary and the big one has not hit here - YET.

Massachusetts is a great EMP target with millions of musket balls in the ground just waiting for a hit.....
 
Pretty much that's all we can do.

My brother can definitely confirm the number of musket balls. He's found plenty while out metal-detecting.

We are pretty magnetic here too with tons of magnetite and bog iron. I confirmed both by using a small piece of an earth magnet from a hard drive attached to a piece of string and placing that in close proximity to one of the rocks. The magnet on the end of the string swung right over and attached itself to the rock. I have a blob of bog iron I found one day quite some time ago. It looks like a blob of dog poop but it's rusty metal color. There's no question what it is by the way the magnet snaps right to it.

With all that metal in the ground plus no wonder we're a lightning target!
 
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