All of a sudden I started getting warnings that my system32 dir was corrupt. I tried to reboot, it said a kernel file was missing. Argh.

I rebooted into another partition, and it ran chkdsk, which tried to repair a bunch of stuff.

Here's the thing -- my event viewer has an entry that says:

"The driver has detected that device \Device\ScsiPort0 has old or out-of-date firmware. Reduced performance may result."

Out of date FIRMWARE in my HARD DRIVE??

The drive keeps spinning up and down, and each successive chkdsk run says it's fixing more things.

I'm not optimistic, and I've got that sinking feeling.

BTW, the drive is a 5 gig Maxtor Diamondmax IDE. (NT categorizes all hard drives as SCSI regardless of type.)

If anyone has any clues, please email me. I don't expect to have a lot of uptime, but my wife will be checking my email from work.

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 05, 2000

Answers

Update:

I managed to boot into my main partition.

On a hunch, I went into the BIOS and disabled power management. I'd had it set to spin my drives down after 15 minutes of inactivity to save wear on the spindle bearings.

I don't know if that was the problem or not. So far, I haven't heard any hard drive "clunking" and everything seems to be working OK, fingers crossed.

After watching miles of files fly by in chkdsk, I wasn't figuring I'd be able to reboot at *all*, let alone with everything seeming to work OK.

I wonder if something scrambled the power management interval timer five days after 1/1/2000, causing it to go nuts trying to constantly shut things down?

Time dilation, perhaps?

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 05, 2000.

Ron,
I can't offer any assistance, and I hope you get things stabilized, but I wanted to tell you what a crazy mental image I got when I first read your header "My computer is dying". I envisioned you sitting in a chair beside a hospital bed, your head hung down, and your computer lying on the bed. The monitor was resting sceen-up on the pillow, turned slightly toward you, with a dimly lit glow just barely flickering across the screen. You were tenderly holding a handful of cables which disappeared under the sheets in the general direction of the cpu. Kind of like some a deathbed scene out of some old black and white movie.
Again, I hope you get the glitch ironed out. I enjoy reading your posts. Later, man.

-- Jay Urban (Jayho99@aol.com), January 05, 2000.

Ron, Since the first of this year I had a minimal amount of sleep. Why? Because even thou Y2k is soposedly a non event I am stuck up to my ears into repairing computers. From old motherboards to special applications cards everything is failing.

So fahr I have updated/fixed 28 boxes.

I have seen the screwiest failures and still have one box that is a neverending story of failures.The owner has this box running all of his small busines manufacturing processes and NO backup machine.

It has 6 special cards installed some with there own processor and RTC on it everyone with screwy software. A nightmare to fix.

Yup all of this for a NON-EVENT. If I once more see Kosky telling someone this was nonevent on TV I will sent a cal45 into it.

Look at your drivers for the SCSI, go to the webpage and look for an updated driver. I have seen IDE drivers get crapy last night so I would not put it past your SCSI driver. The motherboard vendor could have an update, look for it.

-- RickJohn (rickjohn1@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.

Ron with all your expertise and savvy, plus more than ordinary foresight of the event and possible consequences, I'm inclined to say that if you couldn;t get your own system compliant, then there is little hope for ANYBODY. Post back with updates.

-- SH (squirrel@huntr.com), January 05, 2000.

Do you have virus protection?

-- Amy Leone (leoneamy@aol.com), January 05, 2000.

I've run some scans, nothing turned up. I'm not particularly "virus prone" (I don't do the things that cause "infections") and NT is itself fairly resistant.

Re SCSI/IDE: my drives are IDE, but NT reports all drives (other than floppy) as SCSI. I think this hearkens back to its OS/2 roots (IIRC, OS/2 originally required SCSI -- and NT is what MS's version of OS/2 evolved into).

It *seems* somewhat stable now. No spindowns for past several hours. There were a couple more corruption issues for chkdsk to resolve -- my heart always skips a few beats for those things.

Today, I've been archiving current work to CDRW, and I've been having a hard time of it. A couple of RW disks rendered unusable and varied weirdness. I guess I should check Adaptec's site and see if they've got anything posted.

A thousand cuts, argh...

Oh, well. If nothing else, this gives me some incentive to finish my RAID project. (I picked up a used 25 GB SCSI RAID box for an obscenely cheap price, and a nice RAID controller for an equally cheap amount, now I need to get a couple of cables, some 72 pin memory for the controller, and a couple of days to configure the beast...)

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 05, 2000.