One more weekend without an image. I didn’t feel like it, I wanted to relax, read some articles about software engineering, and other than that, I had enough trouble.
Remember my computer problems here in Carinthia? I couldn’t determine what the problem was, the computer just crashed. The most likely cause seemed to be the graphics card, I bought a new one, it seemingly fixed the problem, and then it began again. Irregular, intermittent, without any pattern.
Knowing that I would probably have to change parts frequently to determine the faulty component, and also to make sure there is no thermal problem, I put the computer into a new case last week. It’s a Cooler Master 690 II, a very spacious case with lots of room to work with. If you’re interested in details, YouTube has some video reviews, for instance this one.
Since then, the computer was in permanent use for a week, and it did not crash a single time.
OK, actually that was a little unsatisfying. I didn’t expect changing cases to make such a difference. I had suspected one of the hard drives, and because disabling hard drives in the new case is so easy, I had intended to selectively disable components until the problem goes a way.
The new situation was actually worse from an analytical point of view, because I knew that the problem was still there, but seemingly the better cooling had made it much more spurious.
Yesterday evening though, the faulty component revealed itself. My image storage drive, a WD Caviar Green 2TB drive, suddenly showed massive errors. I had just processed the third image in this post, the one with the sun, when the troubles began. After some cold reboots I finally managed to access the drive one more time and to rescue the newly processed but not yet uploaded image.
I’ll take an eSATA external drive case to Vienna, put a new 3TB drive into it, copy data from my computer in Vienna, and then I’ll take it back to Carinthia next weekend. Thanks to the new case, putting the new drive in will be a matter of minutes.
At the moment I have obviously only one copy of all my files, but I am not nervous. The old drive still sits here in Carinthia, and the platters are definitely OK. Thus, although the drive does not work reliably any more, I could still get the data off. There are specialized services for that, a tad costly, but the last time I had to use them to rescue data from a crashed computer, I got everything back, even though the file system already was corrupt.
Anyway. It’s highly unlikely, that the second image drive, the one in Vienna, will crash in the next few days. But then, it’s always good to know what your risks are and which options you have.
The three images are again from my last forage to the river, two weeks ago. Processing is very different between them, because I did it one at a time over two weeks, and I would have liked to harmonize them a little more, but as I have no access to the Photoshop files of the other two images now, I simply can’t. I have shortly contemplated to therefore post only a single image, but then, I really do hope to take images again next weekend, and so they simply must go out of the door 😄
The Song of the Day is another version of “I Cover The Waterfront”, this time instrumental only. It’s Terence Blanchard on his 1994 “Billie Holiday Songbook”. It’s only available on CD, but YouTube has it.