Mei-chan 8

Yesterday, I turned Mei-chan on, and after booting into openSUSE, Firefox loaded and immediately crashed. I rebooted and Firefox was fine after that.

Later on, I was transferring some files over from Taiga to Mei-chan and did a bit of spot-checking on the files, and the last two groups I was spot-checking had some erroneous checksums. With the last group, however, I kept getting different checksums, so I gave up and went to bed after finding out that bad RAM is one possible cause of inconsistent checksums.

This morning, after doing a bit of stuff on Melty, I transferred some files from Mei-chan to Melty before turning Melty off (probably for the rest of today). I then pulled out all the RAM from Mei-chan and put the first two sticks back in and ran Memtest86+. I got a lot of test errors and after a while of poking around in Memtest86+ and the net, I figured out what I needed to do and what to look for.

I ran one pass (and a bunch of other partial passes) with both sticks; one pass with stick 1 (and a few other partial passes while changing the voltage slightly, as well as trying bank 2); one pass with sticks 2, 3, and 4; then finally one pass with 3 and 4. Looks like the memory fault was located only on stick 1, which isn't bad.

After testing, I left sticks 3 and 4 in Mei-chan and proceeded to retest the last two groups of files that I gave up on and got matching checksums for the first group, and a couple bad checksums for the second group, which was remedied by redownloading the files from Taiga.

I then tested out stick 2 in the Dell and it seemed to work just fine, though it was running at DDR2 667 speeds instead of 800 speeds, but that was expected. Therefore, if I decided to give Lie-chan a new set of RAM (2x2GB), I can certainly put the old set into the Dell. I probably won't though, seeing the Dell doesn't really need that much RAM anyway.

Eventually I'll contact Corsair to get replacement RAM since it's not a major priority, as it's only one bad stick and 4GB of RAM is plenty to run Mei-chan with. Out of the 24 sticks of Corsair RAM that I've bought, I've only had one bad stick, which isn't too bad of a rate (4.167%).

To a point, I do wish that I had found the faulty stick sooner, since it would've been a lot easier to get a replacement than to have to live with the bad stick even though it never gave me any major problems until openSUSE 13.1, but as they say "What's done is done."

I could also install Windows on Mei-chan, but I don't think it'd really be all that worth it, since the only reason to would be to be able to play a couple games. Besides the fact that it'd be a major headache to redo the partitioning schemes and whatnot, it'd be hard for me to get comfortable with a long gaming session, as I'm usually either sitting on the bed or on a "cushion" on the floor. There's also the fact that I don't really use Mei-chan year-round, since she can raise the room temperature quite effectively in the summer (it can take her a bit longer in the winter, but she still does heat the room).

There's a bit of a load off of my shoulders, now that I know Mei-chan is stable, but the entire load will be off once I get and verify the replacement RAM.

Network Attached Storage 3

Last Saturday, I was backing up my files onto my NAS to allow me to access a spreadsheet I had made from my best friend's house, and I had stepped into the restroom to relieve myself. A couple minutes later I heard beeping and I ran though what it could be from, and after about half a minute, I figured out it was the NAS.

I checked the fans to make sure they were still spinning, and they were. Once I was back in the chair, I saw that the backup had stalled, and I tried to access the NAS via Firefox to no avail (I might have not waited long enough). I then grab my phone and use the DS Finder application to see what was going on, and it told me that volume 1 has crashed.

I tried restarting the NAS and it didn't work very smoothly, but it didn't help, so I decided to shut it down and pull the disk out. Since I had a bit of trouble pulling the disk out, I moved the NAS itself, removing the cables attached to it, and realized I was pushing on the lock tab down instead of up. I decided to clean the dust out and then connected disk 1 to the Dell to look at the SMART info with Parted Magic.

I found that the "Current pending sector count" had a value of 4, and it was considered a "pre-failure" value. I tried to run the short SMART test, but it hung on 90%. I tried to use MultiSystem to run the SMART test, but the disk utility in it was weird and didn't seem to properly start the test.

I found that there was some sort of systemctl bug that made the SMART test hang at 90% and that it was fixed in December 2013. Unfortunately for me, Parted Magic is dated for August 2013 and MultiSystem for September. I'll eventually download Gparted Live, since I'll need something a bit more updated.

The good news is that I can still use the NAS with a drive missing, though the power button flashes orange when the NAS is awake. I'm grateful for using RAID 1, since it allows for the array to continue to be used until the drive is replaced; I'm sure that if I was using any parity-based RAID array, the array would be unusable until I replaced the drive.

Once I get the newer ISO of Gparted Live, I'll try running the short SMART test again and see what it comes up with. I'll probably format it and try to use it for something else - the hard drive doesn't sound right when reading, so I'd rather not format it and stick it back into the NAS just to have it fail again.

I'll update once I get it tested.