A blog about my rantings, including Games, Game Development, Gaming, Consoles, PC Gaming, Role Playing Games, People, Gaming tips & cheats, Game Programming and a plethora of other stuff.
Yeah, something very bad has happened with one of my boxes... It was not responsive over the network this morning, I thought little of it, power cycled it and came back to it this afternoon.
Anyway, it was still not playing ball, I rolled the vmlinuz image back to 4.4 from 4.15 (the last unattended update I did last week) but everything. I mean everything, every command, every program (except cat and ls) resulted in a "segmentation fault".
Booting into recovery I got a little further, but the syslog looks very worrisome...
And I could only see this image when I had hauled the machine back into the office and plugged a VGA cable into it, over the network and even over the serial TTY it just sat there spinning it's wheels.
I would like some of the data back off this box, it contains the current (more recent) live image of my WOW server and it contains the old archived version of my Ark server.
Other than that there is a ZFS area which I've dumped home photo's onto, but getting that back is easy, I just pull one of the drives out and remount the ZFS elsewhere... I think though I may buy a new main disk for this machine, I like it.
I'm sure you all already know this one, and many vendor specific implementations of SSD drivers/applications prevent this... Not me though.
Yes, I have a dirty cheap (£27) SSD from KingDian in my Laptop... Wait, wait wait, stop abusing me! This is just a boot disk to hold a local OS and some scratch space, all my storage is provided to this machine over NFS.
The trouble? Well, in the late summer the wife and I had a few days away in deepest darkest Wales... Now this was a disconnected break, however, I couldn't resist taking the laptop loaded down with a few DVD based games and a steam download or two, plus I got to take some system code with me and a slew of PDF's I could read... I got a lot of work done, even without Linux (yes I had to flatten the machine back to Windows 7).
And I pretty much put the machine away until just before Christmas, I then needed it again, so flipped it out the cabinet and fired it up, only to immediately find the battery was dead... It had been dying, I rely on a meager source of dodgy, second party batteries from China... You know the kind of Lithium cells you'd not want to leave alone too long.
But being Christmas I was skint, so I've had to wait until the end of the month to get a new battery... Which arrived today, I left it to fire up and take it's first charge, everything looked fine, it was still Windows from the holiday, so I left it to it and I've been and enjoyed some TV...
Upon coming back up however, the machine is mental... Telling me I have no boot device, I had left the machine on... It has no network connection, so it can't have downloaded a Windows update and restarted... I was a little baffled... But fear not, I'm a trained professional...
This got us into a Windows Recovery, and after not giving a shit and starting normally, back into windows, where I started to puzzle out the problem....
Event Viewer, and Applications... Nothing but the panic about the non-clean reboot... System... Hmm... System shows the last event at 16:54 and then the reboot at 23:54 (alright, don't judge, I watched three films okay, and we had a take-away!)...
So what was the event at 16:54... "Service Control Manager".... Hmm, which service.... "The Disk Defragmenter service entered the running state"...
OH SHIT... This is an SSD, you really shouldn't defragment them (it reduces their life)... So it tried to defrag and not only crashed windows, but made the device/bios not able to inter operate upon a warm restart. That's quite a feat.
A hot reboot sorted everything, so I'll not dig any further, however, I'm interested in this phenomenon. The disk is a cheap chuck away one, so I start the defrag manually... BOOM, crash, same thing.
I trawl through my box of bits and find an old OCZ 128GB SSD (which has about 26% life remaining - lol) and I throw Windows 7 onto this... Let it all set up and I come back (it's about 23:35 now, if anyone's counting). Starting the defragger on the OCZ device, no problems.... It just does nothing, the management software from OCZ stops any nastiness.
Back to the KingDian, boot up.. .and Defrag... BOOM.
It's definitely something about the very cheap KingDian drive... Any ideas? Drop it into the comments, but its back to Arch for this machine me thinks.
And yeah, I admit Guy looks a bit banged up... But look at the poor sod at the 40 second mark... he's ruined those jeans... just ruined them, taking a tumble like that!
