You are quite right I don't. I did suspect the board and if the problem persists that will be the next level of swap. Just it's a bigger job and I want to eliminate other possibles first.
Thanks
Peter Scott
All very helpful. Thanks. My mobo has an Asus monitoring utility for fans and temps. I used it at the start, then stopped when all seemed to be OK. I'll restart it.
So in summary: PSU suspect Too little fan oomph, perhaps, so drives overheating Leads and UPS OK Mobo dodgy, probably disk controller Disks are slow starters from cold Install and *use* utilities
Best wishes
Peter Scott
That's plenty cool enough... if it were 40+ then I would be more concerned.
Pass - there might be. But I have had systems in the pas that ran drives very hot, and they did not appear to have any self protection.
Yup a bit odd indeed. I guess you will have to watch it and see. A decent backup regime would take the stress out of the exercise!
Yup, still not ruled out. Lack of current on the 12V rail possibly...
That one is pretty rare these days unless the drives have spin up problems (again unlikely for them to both develop the problem together at exactly the same time). Especially if there are only a couple of drives in the system. Also if that were the problem a reset or three fingered salute would let it boot immediately after the first failure.
It isn't the data that's the problem. I have a NAS which keeps all files backed up automatically and I burn DVDs as a second level of security about once a month. It's the drudge of re-installing Windows and all the apps I use. That's why I didn't keep up with the monitoring utilities. Didn't want to reinstall them again.
I tried Norton Ghost to produce an image of the program disk but found it frankly incomprehensible, and I'm not stupid. Anyway I didn't get it to do what I wanted. I know images are supposed to work and a friend who ran a commercial network used Ghost for centralised updating. But that was before it was acquired by Norton. Any suggestions for a good image backup package?
Peter Scott
Try Acronis True Image.
A customer recently wanted to buy the best one so I downloaded trial versions of every one I could find and tested them. True Image was the only one that worked. The rest of the others failed to restore the data on his machine satisfactorily and some of them were a real pain to make work.
I think they allow a trial version to see if it works for you.
I recently got a new drive and PSU for this computer. The drive was a WD one. A WD version of Acronis True Image is available on their website. It worked impeccably transferring and expanding my windows and linux partitionsthat it recognised and transferred my linux (Ext4) partition perfectly as an image.
Putting it in, everything, to my great surprise booted up as before. The only snag was I'd allowed Acronis to re-size my /home partition to greater than
512GB and windows can no longer see it with Ext2FSThe problem turned out to be faulty memory, found by a gparted boot disk I was going to use before I found Acronis.
Well my comment about "decent backup regime" sort of hinted that you may want to consider disaster recovery along side and possibly separately from protecting your data.
For example, a disk image of your boot partition can be kept on the NAS, and with the right software on a CD, you can boot from that and restore the image to a new drive. If you keep your boot partition at a sensible size, then you can have an image restored in minutes. It does not matter if its relatively out of date at that point, because you then have the environment there to get at your proper backups.
Ghost is one popular solution, and modern versions of it don't seem too complicated - although they have added extra bells and whistles that are not just about imaging. Acronis True Image[1] is probably the better product these days however for driving imaging. A number of backup apps will also allow backups to be made to image files.
A disaster recovery image can be held on a plug in USB drive if you want.
[1] Seagate MaxBlast 5 is a tool they provide FoC for imaging and copying drives. Its actually a branded (and cut down) version of True Image. You can download it as an ISO image and write your own boot CD for it. Their version is supposedly limited to only function on systems that include one of their drives (or maxtor or another of their owned brands). If you run on a system where there is no recognised drive brand it puts up a dialogue and quits when you OK it. If however you type ALT
My solution is somewhat easier. ALL my important data is on a non windows networked server machine, of which the second disk is pretty much a mirror of the first. I can reinstall from a boot disk to a clean disk and roll all the data back in a few minutes.
Windows if I use it at all, is in a virtual machine, where I can snapshot it, save the resultant mess and revert to it in seconds if necessary.
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