Hardware Woes

Back in the days of my high school internship at Microsoft, one of my responsibilities was to help manage my team's servers in the lab. It was a fun job, especially because it was my first experience dealing with server hardware. These were old machines, however, and seemed to constantly have problems. I was the guy who had the largest number of help requests submitted to our lab manager (Joe was his name, I believe). He once told me that I must have magnets in my pockets, because he's never had so many hardware problems until I showed up!

Sadly, I wonder if this is true in some way. Recently, the Windows server that I set up in my previous post had a series of hard-drive failures. This was a nightmare, because I'm busy enough as it is, but now I have to figure out why this thing blue-screens on me when I try to boot it up. It turned out that the file-system had been corrupted (I blaim Windows Update and a forced reboot, but arguing won't get us anywhere). In the end, the hard-drive ended up needing to be replaced and I quickly learned the importance of backups. We almost lost a huge chunk of our ImagineCup project, but thankfully, I was able to get it to finally boot up long enough for me to back up the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server databases onto my 20GB iPod (who would have guessed, Apple saves the day)! We purchased a new hard-drive (laptop hard-drives are expensive, by the way!) and now the server is up and running again...this time, with scheduled backups running automatically.

That's not the end of the story though. My beloved laptop, my relatively new Inspiron 6000 which I love dearly, decided it didn't like it's hard-drive either. Lately, it's been hanging when starting up from hibernation and sleep and occassionally freezes completely while I'm doing work. Thankfully, Dell is awesome about quickly sending me replacement parts and I should get a new hard-drive soon. Again, the iPod is currently housing my important documents and I can't help wondering if I really do have magnets embedded in my skin! These events happened within about a week! I've never had hard-disk problems in my life! Luckily, my Dell desktop (the FreeBSD box), which I've had for all four college years now, is still plugging away like a champ and has there for me during these hard times.

If you don't already, I recommend anyone who reads this learn how to back up your important files. Consider how upset you would be if you lost your music collection, photo album, electronic journals, or whatever else you keep on your computer. I was lucky because my failures weren't total - meaning, my computers would occassionally start up and let me save my data somewhere else, but if you're like my old roommate, Nate, you might not be so lucky (he lost some pretty awesome photos he had taken over the years). Windows XP comes with one basic backup program called ntbackup (Start->Run->"ntbackup"). It works fine for me. If you want something that gives you a little more fine-grained control, a prettier user interface, and lots of other file synchronization features, check out the SyncToy PowerToy from Microsoft.