Bruce F. Webster

A few years ago, I bought an off-the-shelf (well, delivered from Amazon) Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server. It came with a single 2TB hard drive, 2 GB of RAM, an Intel Atom CPU 230 (1.6 ghz), three empty hot-swap drive bays, and Windows Home Server 2003 pre-installed; I added three more 2TB drives to the box. After some initial issues, it generally worked fine until last fall, when problems began to surface. However, I’ve held off because I knew I would have to back up over a terabyte of files from the various shares on the WHS box…which is why I’m now into March without having done anything.

However, while logging into the WHS box to do some system maintenance, I found that the system partition was full, which was causing system problems. I thought, “How can the system partition be full? That’s a 2TB drive!” Well, Acer in its infinite wisdom partitioned that drive (not a bad idea) and made the C: system partition only 20 GB in size. Now, I’m an old-school geek and can talk about dealing with paper tape and cassette drives, but when you have 2 terabytes[1], why do you only allocate 1% to the system partition? Particularly when, as I quickly discovered, WHS systems have a habit of eating up the entire system partition with log files and $ntuninstall folders.

OK, so now what I really need to do is resize the partitions on the WHS boot drive. Which means, yeah, I really will need to rebuild WHS, which is what I’ve needed to do for some time. Which means I am now backing up all the shares onto external USB hard drives.

Speaking of which: I ran into a problem doing that, namely that WHS wouldn’t recognize the external USB drive. After googling around, I came up with the following solution:

• Plug the USB drive in.
• Go to the Device Manager and look under Universal Serial Bus controllers. There I found the USB drive with a yellow triangle. I right-clicked and brought up Properties.
• In the Properties panel, go to the Driver tab and asked to reinstall the driver. When asked, I told it to go find the drivers itself.

To my delight, it did so, installing the drivers for USB Mass Storage Device, after which the USB drive mounted.[2]

So I’ve been backing up shares (photos, music, videos, etc.) since yesterday afternoon. I’m going to duplicate some of the shares — that is, back them up onto two different external hard drives — just because I’m paranoid.

Stay tuned.  ..bruce..

[1] Yes, I’m very much aware that the marketing types sold us out with regards to how big a terabyte actually is, which means that a “2 terabyte” drive really only holds 1.8 TB. Stop interrupting me.

[2] Actually, the first time I did this, it failed — because there was not enough free space on the C: partition. I went and deleted more stuff, then tried it again, and it worked.

My systems are all Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. One of my desktops has a Logitech webcam on it.

My wife’s systems are all Mac OS X. Her MacPro tower has a webcam on it.

We’re on the same LAN, but we’re two floors apart.

Is there a simple way to set up video chat within the LAN between our systems without having to go outside the network?

One of my three desktop systems — a slim Gateway tower (SX2802-01) I’ve had for about two years — notified me last week that the hard disk (a Seagate Barracuda 7200, 750 GB) was failing. I googled the Windows system message, and what I found indicated the hard drive was indeed on its way to failure. I then downloaded some hard drive test and analysis utilities, which told me the same thing. And then I noticed when I rebooted the system, I was getting an ACHI error message during the BIOS POST. Sigh. Yeah, I guess the hard drive really is failing.

Fortunately, it is the system I use the least; even though there were some 200+ GB of work-related files (4.5+ million files), those were mostly copies of files that existed on external media. Still, I noticed that the system was performing a lot slower than usual, which I assume was side effect of the disk problems. I couldn’t complete a Windows system backup onto an external drive — the process would end in failure after about 20 minutes — so I copied the work files onto an external drive. That took over 24 hours to complete, but it did complete.

Since I wouldn’t be able to restore from a Windows system backup, I began to wonder whether I had created the usual new-Windows-system recovery discs two years ago, and if so, if I could find them. Turns out the answer to both questions was ‘yes’. So I unplugged and popped open the system today and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to pull the old hard drive (750 GB). In doing so, I saw that there were two empty memory slots (out of 4 — with 2 GB SRDRAMs in each of the other two slots). So I drove to Micro Center today — oh, I wish Fry’s would open a store in Colorado — bought a 2 TB hard drive (WD Caviar Green) and two more 2 GB simms. This is great — after recovery, I’ll have twice the RAM and three times the disk storage.

However…when the restore process completed and Windows attempted to reboot, I got an “Install Windows” error box telling me, “Windows could not complete the installation. To install Windows on this computer, restart the installation.”

Sigh.

So I hit Google to look up possible solutions. The first one that seemed potentially applicable was here: it suggested I download a bootable version of MiniTool Partition Wizard, burn it to a CD, partition the hard drive into smaller chunks, and re-do the installation. I did so, but realized in the process that I didn’t know the exact partition size of the main partition of the original hard drive. So I estimated it, created a partition named ‘OS’ of that size, create two other partitions, went through the recovery process again. This time, on rebooting…nothing happened. Nothing booted. The screen stayed blank.

OK, so now I do what I should have done in the first place: I plug the original hard drive back into the tower, boot, and examine the partitions on it. Get the data, then create the same partitions, same sizes, same names, on the new hard drive. Start the recovery process.

That doesn’t work, either.

I use MRW to repair the master boot record, do a surface check, try several different partition configurations, even zero out much of the hard disk. Nope.

I talk with my son Wes, who heads up sys/network admin for a very large, multi-state company. He suggests buying an off-the-shelf, non-upgrade copy of Win7 and installing it. At this point, I’m wondering if it might have been cheaper just to buy a new desktop system, but I order Win7 anyway. It should get here tomorrow. Stay tuned.

UPDATED [3/20/2012]

Well, doing a clean OTS install of Win7 Pro worked. Let this be a warning for those of us who rely upon the ‘recovery disc’ sets that our new desktops and laptops urge us to burn when we first boot up the machine. Not that you shouldn’t do it, but you need to realize that they might not work should you ever have to use them.

Now, on to my next project: rebuilding my Windows Home Server box.

I spent a little time over at Google Groups, searching the USENET archives for posts that I had made and found (among others) the following:

======================
From: crash!bwebs…@SDCSVAX.ARPA
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 85 01:26:31 PDT
Subject: 2MB Macintosh!

Well, space cookies, I did it.  In a fit of passion, I went down to
Levco Enterprises (which is conveniently located here in SD) and had
my 128K Mac upgraded to 2MB.  A bit of a jump, what?  I’m still
waiting for the final PROM set (due in a few days); when those come,
I’ll really start wringing it out and let you know the results.  In
the meantime, I’ve had fun running it, usually with a 1MB RAMdisk and
1MB of application RAM.  Makes the Little Beige Toaster scream along.

“What,” you may ask, “about the ROM upgrade problem?”  My basic
response is, “I don’t really care.”  However, since the big shakeup at
Apple, new rumblings have come out indicating that Apple is suddenly
concerned about supporting 3rd party upgrades and that the previous
hard-nosed attitude is becoming very soft indeed.  This would tend to
confirm suspicions that the previously promulgated (if not announced)
policy sprang from the brow of Steve Jobs.
..bruce..
[Usual disclaimer...I'm *paying* for my upgrade.]

Bruce F. Webster/BYTE Magazine
ARPA:  crash!bwebster@ucsd
uucp:  {ihnp4, cbosgd, sdcsvax, noscvax}!crash!bwebster
CIS:  75166,1717
USPS:  c/o BYTE, 425 Battery Street, San Francisco, CA 94111
======================

Those were the days, eh? Here are more (contemporaneous) details on the Levco upgrade from my old friend Joel West. Something to keep in perspective when you feel constrained by 4 GB of RAM.  ..bruce..

A few months ago, I wrote a post contrasting my experience with setting up and using an Apple TV (v2) device vs. setting up and using a Roku 2 streaming device. The Apple TV device came out very favorably, and while I did get the Roku 2 to finally update its software and start functioning, I have continued to use the Apple TV (which I’ve had since last spring) far more heavily.

But now a problem has arisen with the Apple TV devices (I own two). Some weeks ago — I’m not sure exactly, since I have been traveling heavily since the start of November — my Apple TV(s) started dropping their wireless connection with my dual-band N router (DLink DIR-825, hardware version B1, firmware 2.06NA). Prior to that time, I could start streaming a playlist from one of our computers that have iTunes libraries, and the music would play for hours. Now it’s hard to get it to play for more than an hour the Apple TV drops, then reestablishes the wireless connection (halting the playlist in the meantime). Sometimes it will happen two or three times in the space of 5 minutes; other times, it will run for a few hours before resetting. But the problem itself and its variability makes the Apple TV fairly useless for streaming audio and video.

I did some of the usual — rebooted the entire wireless network, did a restore on the Apple TV, swapped the two Apple TV devices, made sure both had the latest software updates, and so on. Same problem. Searches on the ‘net showed that people have complained about similar or identical problems going back to 2010, but my problem didn’t start until about 6 weeks ago — my Apple TVs were pretty solid before then.

I ran a test earlier today which strongly suggests that the problem does lie with Apple TV. The living room Apple TV sits side-by-side with that Roku 2 device; both are hooked up to the same TV and are the same distance from the router (which, by the way, is only about 25-30′ away; most of that distance is open air, and there are no walls in-between). As it turns out, both the Apple TV and the Roku 2 support Netflix. So I fired up the Roku and picked a relatively short film to play (Blackadder’s A Christmas Carol). Said film played perfectly all the way through with no pauses, stutters, hiccups, or other issues. I then switched over to the Apple TV, brought up Netflix there, and selected the same film. It played fine for about the first 14 minutes — and then went into a pause mode (rotating circular arrow). Every few minutes, it would come out of that mode, play for another few seconds, then go back into pause mode again. This went on for a good half hour before I finally killed it.

I have yet another test running as I type this: I have both Apple TVs connected to the same router band (the same one the Roku is connected to), streaming audio from the same iTunes library (on this laptop) simultaneously. If one drops the wireless connection and the other doesn’t, then that increases the chances that it is in fact an Apple TV problem. So far, both are running fine (of course).

In the meantime, if others of you have encountered this problem and have known solutions, please let me know.  ..bruce..