trouble on the horizon (locally, that is)
8 Dec 2009 17:42:56 UTC
Topic 194664
(moderation:
My PC is having all sorts of problems lately. I've made the decision to upgrade to Win 7 and to move to a different hard drive. Here are some examples of what has been happening that support my above decisions.
I run the latest boinc app with SETI and Einstein as the two projects I bounce between. I have the latest Nvidia driver (last night installed) and use the gpu option for crunching. Twice now power has gone out (within one month period) and I have had lots of problems getting my system to recognize my boot drive. Eventually it gets recognized, I reset it to be the boot drive in the bios, and all is well. Along the way, I have been experiencing increasing latency when attempting to do anything. Opening a program now takes about 5x longer to open. (atleast that's the way it seems to me) Once I'm running a program, most operations seem to happen in the time frame they are supposed to. So it must be a disk related problem, I'm thinking. I have run my antivirus until it crashed (this morning) to which I have updated to the most recent version, but it now locks up. I'm very proactive with system security and reliability, so if something like a virus has gotten in, I can't find it.
I don't know what's causing the latency. When it gets bad, I turn off gpu crunching. That helps immensely with screen rewrites, but it doesn't help with disk i/o.
So as I said, I'm starting over with a new HD and OS. How can I best protect any work in progress and then transfer that over to the new drive once it is setup and running the new os?
If anyone has any ideas on my other symptoms, please feel free to elaborate. I'm all ears.
trouble on the horizon (locally, that is)
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For the screen rewrites, seti has problems with a certain kind of tasks when they are run on a GPU, just head over to there "Number crunching" forum and search around for "VLAR".
Sorry, but can't help you with your other problem.
/Holmis
Another area worth checking
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Another area worth checking is the power supply - both the PSU module itself, and the voltage regulation and capacitors on the motherboard.
If you do switch to a new HDD, close down BOINC fully on the old install. Then, take a copy of the entire BOINC Data directory structure (see here for location - it may well be hidden) on someting removable (but not a CD, unless you zip it first. That makes files read-only). You don't have to worry about the BOINC programs.
Once the new HDD is running and Windows is installed - run some burn-in tests while you're at it, to ensure your diagnosis of drive failure is correct - copy the BOINC Data back again, and then run the BOINC installer. Choose the 'Advanced' option in the installer, and tell it the location of the data directory you've just loaded. Should be plain sailing from there.
RE: Another area worth
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Thanks guys. I'm off to buy the HD and OS.
RE: So as I said, I'm
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It's quite likely that your disk latency problems may be due to the onset of one or more bad sectors. There are many ways to check this through surface scans but to do it properly you need to analyse the drive when Windows is not running. The use of a recovery CD makes this easy. I've used UBCD4Win (Ultimate Boot CD for Windows) to boot up and perform surface scans with a utility called HDTune but if you google something like 'Hard Disk Surface Scan' you'll get zillions of alternative suggestions including manufacturer supplied tools to do the same thing.
How much trouble you go to depends largely on the value you place on the stuff you have on your existing drive and whether or not you have it backed up. I'd be doing a surface scan for bad sectors and if they turn up, I'd be considering a fresh install of your Windows of choice on a new drive, since new drives are very cheap these days. There are advantages and disadvantages of going to Win 7 or staying with XP. I tend to subscribe to the philosophy that a new Windows is a risk until at least the first service pack is out. If it were me I'd be saving the cost of the upgrade for a little while yet :-). It very much depends on what your needs are.
With a fresh install on a new drive and the old drive present as well, you should be able to copy across anything that you don't have backed up or saved. You can do this for the BOINC stuff. Before you shut down the old drive, you should completely stop BOINC and then uninstall BOINC. You will be left with the BOINC Data directory residing wherever you installed it originally. You should take a copy of that directory and all its subdirectories and put it on something like a USB drive as an extra backup if you wish. With the new system running, you can copy BOINC Data from the old drive and paste it in place on the new Windows drive. Just reinstall BOINC on the new system and it will pick up all your existing settings and data and continue on from where it was stopped.
If you take a look at your list of tasks, you can see some errors very recently. If you drill down through the taskID, you can see the error messages. I've seen these type of messages before on systems that have a failing hard disk. You also mentioned crashing your antivirus software. maybe that is what caused your task errors.
I've also seen the other warning signs you mention of difficulty in booting and slowness in disk i/o and these can also be associated with a failing drive. If all this goes away with a fresh install on a new drive, you'll have your definitive answer.
EDIT: There was only one reply when I started this. I guess I'm way too slow :-).
Cheers,
Gary.