197 HDD PANIC
Mi notebook is getting slow..
I blame the last windows big update of course.
Heck,
what happened with the technician intuition, the one I should carry inside?
The long time without using it I suppose.
After the lag, it worked qui... mm... at regular speed as usual.
When I bought this machine I looked for the inexpensive ones. Not cheap, not fancy. Just a worker's machine.
Under 10000 pesos budget is enough. No, no, no... THAT. I like THAT one...
The all black Acer. 8000 pesos. Every other else were shiny with the brilliant logos I hate. Not this.
The bigger screen for this price: 1366x768, maybe its bad side is the narrow view angle... easy fix, just adjust the screen and don't move the head too much, and you'll have the benefit of no foreign eyes on your desk. CPU: i3-7100 2.4 what the heck, Is it good? I don't know. Well, it is NOT a Celeron, that should be enough. Memory? 4GB is so little ram, but again, ok within the price.
The cost is OK. Mmm. The cost is ok, in Argentina at least. Thats makes little sense, so what's the catch. The 1TB disk. HDD... 5600 RPM. That's it. VERY slow, it should be forbidden. My thought: I can later replace it with a 128GB SSD. It will be like flash! So I acepted as OK.
Then I fell in love with the big keyboard... something I still regret, the only piece of hardware I hate now. It WORKS OK, but it is impossible for the fingers to learn it. ESC, FN, DEL, HOME, POWER: all the way to the last from the first to the last, a continuous line of 22 keys with no gaps between each other nor to the numeric keys. You want to press 1, your finger hesitates then pres F1 or escape. The Z key? Never found. Shift is smaller than the rest, I keep hitting < or x or WIN. BKSP? ENTER? Special Spanish letters á é í? Fuck, I miss Dell's keyboard. Your fingers learn it fast no matter the small they can get, thanks only the little gaps between the sections of the keyboard.
I was quite happy with the rest of the hardware anyway.
But windows... I was forced to buy it. And they keep ruining it. Here the list.
*
First, Acer shit. Not as bad as Lenovo or HP, not at all. Nice stuff... I got rid of it anyway. I choose my own shit. Norton Antivirus? The first. Get off my CPU cycles.
*
Soft that recommends...
Sound interesting, let's see. The first, Crypto mining. WTF. I won't burn my CPU day and night for a year to make some cents, I know the math. I have my cellphone bitcoin wallet with ZERO and it will keep that way for a long time. Kill it.
I still don't know if the recommendation came from Acer or from Win Store. Who cares. Ok, I care. To know who to blame.
*
The first thing on any win I work is to sedate visual a bit. Background windows from white to gray.
What the fuck.
No way to do that. I looked everywhere, nothing. I angrily wrote to the user center.
"High contrast config" they suggested me.
It's a BIG NO. Those themes are the worst. You turn psycho after using them.
Besides, with no white you save battery, with any screen technology, because you need lower contrast to be comfortable.
But the win schizophrenia helped here. Win 10 is a work in progress. The ugly visual elements were new, but the machine that make stuff work is from Win 7 and the low config tuning is still from XP via XP64. So I looked for registry entries, then changed from white to gray. Explorer, notepad, some accessories. A peaceful gray... At last!
Until the update. They continued injecting (ruining) new stuff so now the new code does not read my registry entries anymore. So I needed to wait for the w10 "dark theme". I don't need a fancy dark theme, I need just to get rid of the electric white that crushes my eyes!! When I open the notebook near the balcony at night the birds on the street start singing.
Well. Eventually, dark theme arrived. Guess what. They don't understand dark theme. First, it is not integrated, it's a patch. It behaves the worst: You open the explorer, it flashes in blindly bright white then turn to the dark theme. That stupid.
The second, they use deep black for the toolbar. You NEVER put black inside a window. Black cuts things in two. You can never figure out where the window limits are.
There is more: Don't use black at all: Deep dark gray saves energy in some technologies anyway, but turning black turns the oled off then you'll have a flickering when it illuminates again, hard to read. Not that I care, I don't have oled.
*
We have problems reading your phone...
Not WE. YOU have problems trying to sniff what you don't need to. Out of here. Just charge my phone, don't mess with it.
*
Recent stuff.
Hey, that's the porn I just saw? Not a good thing to show when in McDonalds or in front of a customer. Out of here, "recent files". Recent meaning last month.
*
Time line
The same, fails to show the last spreadsheets I just worked on and shows a too big capture of the video I watched last sunday. Out.
*
Search.
Lots of BIG thumbnails... hey, that porn is personal, How do I launch anything for the customer to watch without showing this? GET OUT!! I don't need you.
*
W10 toolbar.
Why the dancing tiles. What's the purpose.
And the looooong list of installed programs alphabetically disordered. Lots of clicks to find what you need.
This is the worst menu MS invented.
Nobody remembers, W95 was better. Far better. So I implemented it. Just compare: HALF screen, not FIVE /mouse roll/click/click/clik to find anything. Just ONE click and you navigate the entire list, another ONE click and you launch. Perfect. Same for documents.
No, not perfect. Dark theme does not apply on toolbar background, they are still white. Fuck.
Just compare the visual,
the handy menu
The apps, which is easier to read?
Should be easier to read
in a small notebook screen.
They didn't break notepad yet.
*
Antivirus
No way to disable it. I tried, succeeded, then next update it started again. Fuck it.
*
Then, index. I cannot disable it anymore like I did it in W7.
It IS slow. You don't need it. Windows doesn't need it either for the OS to work, and is a really BAD index. They should buy it from Google, the world wide search is faster than my folder search. Or copy it from linux. My Deepin partition reads windows tree faster than w10.
W10 "needs" it just to sniff your things.
You don't need index. Specially if you know where your stuff is. Mine, in my toolbars. So:
I split disk in three. Linux, small win OS C:, big data D:
ALL my windows data is now on D: drive. Downloads, movies, torrents, projects, porn, etc. and I CAN forbid the index to work in the entire partition. Yes, it IS faster. Maybe because the OS has a much smaller place to work with. It is not a blind guess, I've made some experiments with virtual memory... back in W98.
But I left W10 believing the user folders are still there in C disk. Docs, pics, movs, music, downloads, virtual machines, etc, they all are in D disk. Stupid win, it's still trying to administrate /user/. Ok, you play there. It's all garbage, Windows garbage you put there, play with it if you like. Just don't mess with my D. Chrome & firefox know I download in D: it's all I need.
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Virtual Mem
Funny, Skyrim works pretty fine. Then crashed. Log: 2 GB ram skyrim. 2+GB from... antivirus. WTF. So I let win to auto-manage VM again.
It's OK again.
Until.
Yesterday...
Heck, This is different. Disk is barely moving, Doesn't seem win stuff.
¿Virus? Of course not. I have adblock in chrome & FF. Not likely at least.
Again. Win?
The last thing I did is configuring my Discord account via github to work with the translation team...
There, in the desk is still the photo I used. The 4 years old pic... Well, my mates are all really young people, I didn't want to intimidate them with my new white bearded look.
Chrome, too many tabs... Nonsense, the only reason it gets slow is when the memory gets short and start to work with the disk...
And the disk looks quiet in the task admin...
Oops!
This:
I know this. Too late. Not virus, not win. Ha, I remember from years ago:
"To protect your machine Windows stopped this program: Windows Explorer", I swear! You believe me? Well, it's easy to believe. Still true.
Not this time. I knew it before it showed up... Still, too late.
Odd. It let me take a screenshot and save it, but any win command was frozen.
Then it stopped.
Then it went black. Not blue, black. A long while.
OK, let's try Linux
None of them,
Setup is ok (setup should have S.M.A.R.T. reader!! Maybe they now expect only SSD devices...)
It sees the disk...
but it fails to boot Win or Linux.
Not now!
Warranty. Long gone.
Mm.
Cellphone. MercadoLibre SSD notebook
128 GB search... No much diff with 250 GB
Ok
250 GB search... Cheapest options WD green and gigabyte.
Old. Seacrch specs... NO WAY!
Kingstom, little more expensive, better specs, some. Maybe. 4300 pesos. Not today... Last month maybe, not now in the middle of quarantine. I want to order a pizza, not a 4000+ pesos disk.
I should try to recover the disk.
Tauro pendrive, linux Deepin. Tauro's pen... Tauro's Stolen 2 disk from me, some small jobs I earned, one not small at all, half of salary during the 8 years I worked there, taxes and my pride. Screw Tauro's pen drive.
No. Can't read the disk.
What if...
Well, I thought I got nothing from Atlas Copco, the one that stole my retirement insurance for almost nothing. (No, Im not contradicting myself. When Atlas Copco wanted me to sue Tauro and I refused, they joined with Tauro lawyers to intimidate me. And it worked.)
Screwdrivers box.... Oh? A cellphone? The one Rodrigo gave me! How in the hell I forgot it. The trauma lag I forgot everything. I could have saved the 4000 the Moto Android cost.
Then I found it. I was wrong, I got something from Atlas Copco. I still have the (useless) servers room access card and... A Dell pen drive!
I would have returned them, is nothing compared to the millions they saved (stoled from me I must said), I didn't return it because they blocked all my stuff before the ink of our agreement went dry...
Ah?
The pendrive.
What if...
YES. It is booteable. Mmm.
Whay a surprise, it doesn't work. What kind of luck did you expect.
Ah, setup, boot options.
IT'S ALIVE!!!
The funny story the guy who elevates in the air pulling from the straps of his boots...
...boot strap.
Error. What a surprise.
But it shows the command prompt.
Let's see...
Oh, Disney folder. The drivers for the cheap notebook Ariel Rubinstein bought to his kid. Franco I think? I -barely- remember it because the first password I put was "sincero". Then I forgot it for a while, then remembered it again. The bug in my brain only few people know about.
And I still have his drivers. The director of the Atlas Copco Argentina branch. We were friends. We used to practice English that time. Then Atlas Copco screwed me... And I stole the 8GB pendrive, HA! Not that I wanted.
Here it is! That's luck. The Hard disk check software. But it doesn't work.
Script.
It opens a virtual disk, deploy the program, then executes,
Virtual disk fails. Why? Old soft.
I can try to tweek...
wait
why do i need virtual memory. I don't need it at all.
So I decompress the soft, then execute without vm.
It works!
I let the program run
I trust blindly in that program
More memories...
I can't remember his name. Strange. Not strange, there were nearly a hundred people in Atlas Copco, and it was four years ago. Axel? no...
But I remember everyone else...
Not everyone.
When I wanted to write my goodbye mail (before the big depression), with the elio@ar.atlacopco.com blocked (fuck you all) I tried to remember, and I did a list. I knew them all, I didn't want an @everybody bye. I wanted some personalized mail, a dozen maybe (Juli? Forget her you fool), then sectors, provinces, countries, Josh, Antony, Jana... (not Jana I barely knew her), S.Juan, Comodoro, Veladero, the yeties, IT (no, not information but industrial techniques), CTS, Finance, then... uf... I miss them.
I could remember the places from the old building, then the new with the two floors, then the reallocation in one floor, then the rearrange after some firings. Even the San Juan and Comodoro and the Yetis from the highs.
I remembered most of them.
But this guy... had no office, so I forgot to put him on the list although I knew him better than many others.
Anyway, The Big Depression begun, then the shit, then the move, then more shit, then the Alvear Psychiatric hospital, then the friends, the wang2200 site contribution, then javascript, node, the small income from excel thought via subcontract, then the BIG project blueprint, then the quarantine so fuck I'm screwed again, not any income again, 61 years old, asthmatic and a very recent pneumonia 6 years ago as a precedent spiting blood(yes, Atlas Copco again without insurance). Memories.
eh...
Oh, the guy.
He said Tauro screwed him more than once. He is right. From Tauro members and former Tauro members, like the one who crashed his truck, then from me because I didn't protect his hard drive well enough.
But I know exactly what happened, and the who. Moral decision, I couldn't tell. The only one I could tell didn't believe me and he tough I just misplaced the disk. "It happens"...
No way.
The disk was like the mine now. Bad blocks, unable to boot win, unable to read, but alive.
I left the pen drive software to work on that disk, crunchy crunch, after a while it found error. I saw improvement so I knew I could recover it all and soon, despite the manager who wanted me to give the disk to the Big Recovery Specialist Company. End of the day, check... soft hang. Not good. Tried to read. Not a thing. I could get some readings before, it was a surface problem. Now it refuses to read at all, like it was a hardware problem.
I was devastated. What did I do wrong.
Shiping there.
Then the disk came back, with the recovered data from the recovery company
"Do you want us to recover this? It doesn't look useful"
Something wrong.
User home is not correct, it was info from someone in CTS called Schats.
Then the manager says loudly and angrily "It is NOT the disk"
then the guy I baptisted "alex" 'cuz I don't remember his name says "nooooooo" like the movies. Not funy.
I looked everywhere, I found lots of disks and no one was THE one.
I know what -who- happened, but I was unable to tell... And to prove anyway. Yes, it is speculative.
I was blamed and forgiven, a small fall. I know better, and it is not that forgivable.
uh.
Today. Me. Home. Right now.
The pen drive fixed the boot.
Windows started OK.
I am writing this on my beloved notebook.
As I said, I trust this soft with my life. Well, not my life but my disk. Well, I don't have any unrecoverable info anyway, it's in the cloud.
Oops I better disable dropbox. Some files may be corrupted and I surely am unable to notice.
But everything is working.
I didn't let the soft to finish, but still... Notebook is working nicely.
I didn't test Linux yet.
Surely it works ok. (don't call me Shirley)
Deepin is fun. I don't need windows anymore... but Skyrim? Nah. It bores me. It is an impressive game as a tourist... the landscapes, the fauna, the dancing grass, the water reflections... The dragons!! But the missions... I feel like a pizza boy, a big arrow showing where to go and lots of people telling me what to do and the stuff I have to carry for them. But the Skyrim freedom... screw them all.
I better play W98 Freecell.
Or maybe the W98...
Not fair!
Whoa! I just remembered. I have the W98 virtual machine with SQL server 2000 and the project I wanted to port to Azure.
Too big for the pen drive to store. I needed the W98 disk split, sql and project folder in a smaller second disk.
Wait, there is internet now. It is not 1998 anymore. Nor 2004 when I mirrored the SQL and connected the two cities via USRobotics Modems.
I can download an install it again.
Mmm..
Ey, come back.
What to do.
The disk is bad, no matter what SMART tech says.
I KNOW. I built the software that checked untrusted disks, in WANG VS80 assembler. Those disks didn't have SMART tech yet but they suffered the same issues: You MAY have some bad blocks, you can mark them and the system will avoid them. But you have to test the surface. No matter how many blocks are damaged, the important thing is if they are cumulative. That's the thing I tested... so long as far as 1985.
Today, I watch one thing only. SMART Parameter 197.
191 G-Sense = 50. Means shocks. Not nice. I should be careful carrying it. It doesn't matter now.
007 seek error = 0, ok.
194 temp = 27C, cool. he he.
005 Relocated = 272. WTF.
Too many. Corrected, the disk automatically relocated them with no loss. But still... too many.
198 uncorrectable = 0. Should be OK unless...
197 Pending = 328. NOT OK. It says OK, but it is NOT.
The 197 param means bad readings the disk didn't try to reallocate. It should never be greater than zero for long. If it goes zero, WATCH IT. Chances are it wol happen again (196 event +1).
SMART is great if you know how to read it, but the boundaries are too soft then you are never alerted until it is too late. I know better. THIS DISK WILL CRASH AGAIN SOON.
unless...
I SHOULD buy the 4000 pesos ssd, now that I can recover all my stuff (no need, movies mostly, the projects and the rest are in dropbox and github)
but I cannot spend that kind of money today.
I will put the pen soft in Heavy mode: It will low-level eat the disk, sector by sector and spit it again like my 1985's software.
The disk will fail... or endure.
Do it now? Nah, I'll watch some youtube channels I'm addicted. Maybe...
Mañana por la noche.
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